Summary: Replacement of A1000 RAID battery

Many thanks to:

"Paul Norton" <Paul_Norton@nacm.com>
"Fabrice Guerini" <fabrice@bluemartini.fr
Patrick.McDermott@bedbath.com
gene.g.beaird@mail.sprint.com
"Scott Croft" <secroft@micron.com>
Mark Hargrave" <hargrme@wisdom.maf.nasa.gov>
"Koos van den Hout" <koos@kzdoos.xs4all.nl>
"Jesus Merino" <Jesus.Merino@Sun.COM>
"Steven Aizic" <saizic@rogers.com>
d.g.checketts@bham.ac.uk 
"Hans Engren" <hans@swip.net>

The consensus is:

1. Replacement of the A1000 RAID battery will not
change or alter disk array configurations because the
only thing on the battery backup is the cache memory,
nothing else.

2. Replacement procedure is pretty straight forward.
The full recharge might take a few hours (up to 30
hours)
 
3. You need to turn the whole array off before
swapping
the battery. No hot-swap is supported.

Note: the whole A1000 service manual is available
online from the sunsolve web site (pn 805-2624-10) at:
http://sunsolve.sun.com/data/805/805-2624-10/pdf/

----------------------------------------------
Some of the typical responses:
From: gene.g.beaird@mail.sprint.com
Date: Tue, 16 Jul 2002 07:58:21 -0500
Subject: RE: replacement of A1000 RAID battery?

1. Yes, unless it wasn't going to be there anyway
(caused by other problems completely unrelated to the
old battery).  All the battery 
does is provide some short-term power for the cache.

2. Just power off the system.  After you restart the
system and get it back online, you have to reset the
battery time.  The following command is used;
#raidutil -c <device name, i.e., c1t0d0s7> -R <return>
You can go back into Raid Manager to check that it has
been reset.  If you are GUI-fobic, you can also issue
the following command to check that it was reset;
#raidutil -c <device name> -B

You may want to try that before replacing the battery
to see what it says, just for comparison.
3. See No. 2 above.  Yes, you HAVE to power-off the
system.

I have done 7 of the 8 batteries in the A1000's we
have in my office with NO problems.  The 8th system is
running the A1000 as a JBOD (not my configuration) so
the battery is essentially useless.

Good luck.

Gene Beaird
---
Date: Tue, 16 Jul 2002 09:07:09 +0200 (MEST)
From: Jesus Merino <Jesus.Merino@Sun.COM>
Subject: Re: replacement of A1000 RAID battery?

Hi Toni,

1. Yep, no problem with the original disks.

2 & 3. You have to turn the A1000 off, replace the
battery, turn it on again and then reset the time
counter with the following command:

# raidutil -c <controller_of _the_battery> -R

This steps should be enough.

Regards,

Jesus
---
Date:Tue, 16 Jul 2002 07:26:29 +0200 (MEST)
From:"Hans Engren" <hans@swip.net>
Subject: Re: replacement of A1000 RAID battery?

1.You don't have to worry about your disk
configuration, the only thing on battery backup is the
cache memory, nothing else.

3.The battery is not replaceable live or online. The
power to your A1000 needs to be turned off to replace
the battery. This is clearly stated in the product
documentation you recieved with your A1000, which also
is what you should follow unless instructed to do
otherwise by SUN.

 -- Hans.
    Si fractum non sit, noli id reficere.
---
From: d.g.checketts@bham.ac.uk
Subject: RE: replacement of A1000 RAID battery?
Date: Tue, 16 Jul 2002 08:41:59 +0100

We had two of these changed about 12 months ago. They
were swapped out by a Sun engineer (we have
maintenance). The answers to your questions (as 
best as I can remember) are :-

1. Yes. The batteries are only for write caching on
these units. The actual disk configurations will not
be affected in any way.

2. When you first power back on (assuming the
batteries are not fully charged) you may find that
caching is not enabled for a while. This could result
in a performance hit on writes but you can otherwise
operate normally. Error/Warning messages may appear
during this time.

3. It's NOT a hot swap situation. You really do need
to turn off the box - or so the engineer working on
ours insisted.

Regards

Dave

*******************************************************
Dr. D.G.Checketts
Engineering Computer & IT Officer
University of Birmingham
B15 2TT
England

Tel. 0121 414 4322
Fax. 0121 414 4291
*******************************************************
Original Message:
From: Tony Magtalas
Sent: Monday, July 15, 2002 9:47 PM
To: sun-managers@sunmanagers.org
Subject: replacement of A1000 RAID battery?

I am planning to replace the A1000 RAID battery soon
because it is running low. My questions to the
Sun managers experts are:

1. After replacing my A1000 battery, will my original
disk configurations still be there?

2. Anything else I need to be careful while doing the
battery replacement? How long does it take to get
the full charge. 

3. Can I hot swap the battery unit or do I really 
really have to turn off the whole thing just to 
replace the battery?

Thanks
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