HPE MSA Expansion Enclosures

The maximum changes depending on which array you are expanding. The MSA 2040 and MSA 2050 support up to seven additional enclosures — giving a total of eight units including the base array — and can reach up to 96 LFF or 192 SFF drives respectively. The MSA 2060 and MSA 2070 support up to nine additional enclosures, scaling to 7.37 PB of raw capacity in an SFF configuration using 24-drive enclosures, or 2.88 PB in an LFF configuration using 12-drive enclosures. All generations allow LFF and SFF enclosures to be mixed freely within the same system, so teams are not forced to standardise on one drive size when adding capacity.

Enclosures across the MSA 2040, 2050, 2060, and 2070 ranges are all hot-addable — the array continues to serve data while the new enclosure is cabled in and scanned. What does require attention is how new drives are incorporated once the enclosure is recognised. Adding capacity to an existing storage pool expands the available spindles immediately, and on MSA 2060 and 2070 arrays with virtual storage enabled, disk groups can span across enclosures so the performance benefit of additional drives is realised across the pool rather than being isolated to the new shelf. Where an Advanced Data Services licence is required for tiering across mixed media, that licence must already be in place before mixed configurations will tier automatically.

Enclosure compatibility follows generation boundaries rather than model numbers within a generation. MSA 2040 arrays use their own LFF enclosure alongside the D2700 SFF enclosure. MSA 2050 arrays use dedicated MSA 2050 LFF and SFF enclosures, though the MSA 2050 enclosure is also confirmed compatible with MSA 2040 arrays. MSA 2060 and MSA 2070 share the same Gen6/Gen7 SFF and LFF expansion enclosures — the physical shelves are interchangeable between those two generations, which matters to teams running mixed-generation MSA environments. Drive options are not backward compatible beyond Gen6; drives certified for Gen6 and Gen7 arrays are not supported on Gen5 or earlier systems.

On MSA 2060 and 2070 arrays running virtual storage with an Advanced Data Services licence, automated tiering moves data between SSD, Enterprise SAS, and Midline SAS tiers based on how frequently each data block is accessed. Adding an enclosure populated with Midline SAS drives, for example, extends the archive tier — lower-cost capacity for data that is rarely accessed — without affecting how performance-sensitive data behaves on the faster tiers already present. The tiering engine adjusts automatically once the new drives are incorporated into the pool; no manual reconfiguration is required. On MSA 2040 and 2050 arrays, tiering behaves similarly but the automated movement is managed through the earlier-generation tiering engine rather than the v2 implementation introduced in Gen6.

Traditional RAID configurations reserve one or more physical drives as idle spares — drives that sit unused until a failure occurs and then carry the entire rebuild load. MSA-DP+, available on MSA 2060 and MSA 2070 arrays, distributes spare capacity across all drives in a disk group rather than dedicating physical disks to standby duty. When an enclosure is added and drives are incorporated into a disk group using MSA-DP+, all drives — including those in the new enclosure — participate in any future rebuild. This reduces rebuild time by up to 25 times compared with traditional RAID, which matters most in large, high-capacity configurations where a standard RAID rebuild across multiple high-density drives could otherwise take days. MSA 2040 and 2050 arrays use conventional RAID rebuild behaviour.

Self-encrypting drive (SED) configurations carry a strict constraint across all MSA generations: every drive in the array must be a SED for encryption to be active. Adding a standard, non-encrypting drive — whether into the base array or into an expansion enclosure — disables encryption across the entire system, even if the non-encrypting drives are allocated to a separate storage pool. On MSA 2040 arrays, SED support requires controller firmware GL105 or later. MSA 2050, 2060, and 2070 arrays support SEDs natively. For teams where encryption is a compliance requirement rather than optional, drive selection across both the base array and any expansion enclosures should be planned consistently before the first non-SED drive is installed.