BCM450 R6 Hard Drive Replacement

[bostech]

Hello All,

A customer of mine is requesting that I replace the HD in their BCM450. They've had the system for a number of years and they're worried about the HD failing. They experienced this with a BCM400 in the past.

Is it simply taking a backup, install the new 450 R6 drive, and restore the backup?

Am I being to optimistic?

Thanks

 

[ucxguy]

You have the original hard drive fully functional - that means it can be easily cloned. You should simply buy another SATA hard drive of the same type and size (well - you should be able to use any 500 GB or smaller SATA II hard drive) and use disk cloning software (for example Acronis True Image) to copy the original drive to the new one (make sure to copy the boot sector and all partitions).

If you decide to go with the BCM multi-image hard drive, you should convert the drive to the proper image (450 R6), install all patches to match the current system and then restore the backup. With this option, you'd pay about 8 times more for the multi-image hard drive and spend more time with the conversion and patching of the image.

 

[bostech]

UCX,

Thanks for the reply.

I like the idea of cloning the HD. Is there a particular brand I should use?

Thanks

 

[QueBall780]

I have replaced the 450 hard drives with solid state drives to eliminate the moving parts. Bought intel brand drives. Does not need to be a very big drive. I think the maximum partition size for the BCM450 is about 120GB so I bought 180GB drives. This also is beneficial on a solid state to have some blank space so the SSD firmware can do it's own wear balancing using that blank area.

You can download the Acronis hard disk image files from the Avaya site and restore it. You will need your own copy of Acronis. The home edition is fine and you can restore using a USB to SATA adapter.
You can often find deals for Acronis true image, sometimes last years edition is offered on deal sites for super cheap.

Download the acronis disk image from Avaya here:
[URL unfurl="true"]https://support.avaya.com/downloads/download-details.action?contentId=C20101272229288280_9&productId=P0863[/url]

If you want the higher reliability Intel drives (Much more expensive and not really necessary) but you can get the dc3500 series drives. They are rated for many times more rewrite cycles than the consumer models. So they have used flash chips and firmware that have more redundancy built in. Also should have capacitors that prevent the drive from loosing the last bit of data written in a power failure.

I used the regular consumer 330 series 180GB drives. They were fine.

In addition you will need a bay converter to mount the 2.5" drive into the 3.5" caddy with the pins that line up. I recommend the ICY Dock SATA 2.5 to 3.5 dock. Part number MB982SP-1S
[URL unfurl="true"]http://www.icydock.com/goods.php?id=134[/url]

Our BCM450 had the RAID kit license so did this drive x2.

No need to order the official multi image drive as they provide you the disk image online to do this yourself.