Need more space

[ZoranS]

I have a DL380 G5 with a Smart Array P400 and am running out of space on one of my drives. There are 3 arrays made up of 8 disks. The array in question is RAID 1+0 and made up of 4, 146GB SAS drives. My question is can I replace maybe 2 of the drives to increase the space? Or do I need to replace them all on-by-one with larger drives until everything is synched up and then expand the array? Would that even work? Thanks in advance.

[Rob_at_NSIT · Accepted solution]

Not enough information.

Array details need.

Can you add 2X 146Gb drives to the 1+0 for 6 drives total yes.

Can you replace 2X 146 with maybe a 300Gb, Yes and no.  The array will work but the extra space will be unavailable.

Is the 1+0 the only array on the 146?  If it is you can:

Replace one drive with a 300/600/900/1200.

Allow the system to rebuild the raid.

Replace second drive with a drive equal to the above.

Allow the system to rebuild the raid.

Replace third drive with a drive equal to the above.

Allow the system to rebuild the raid.

Replace forth drive with a drive equal to the above.

Allow the system to rebuild the raid.

Reboot the system (2003/XP).

Expand the raid in the ACU/SSA.

Allow the expanded raid to initialize.

Reboot the system. (Most to all operating systems)

Resize the data volumes as needed.

Things to remember when ever a raid is degraded you risk catastrophic data loss.  The only reason to use the above method is downtime is unacceptable.  It is far better to back up the Data and just create new arrays.  If down time is unacceptable it is time to buy a new server.  G5s maybe rock solid reliable.  But they are 7 to 10 years old.  

A cheap USB 3 adapter and a 2 TB USB3 HHD is only like $150 and make a great backup solution.  Assuming this is a home lab server and not corporate, this will allow you to migrate to SATA.  A configuration of 8 500GB 7.2K SATA Hitachi (Z7K500-500 was the model I used) with a boot raid 1 + 0 of 500GB + a AGD on the remaining space (about 2.5TB) out performed, per Phoronix, a boot raid of 4 DP 10K 300GB in drives 1+0 (both stripes set to 64k) and a data volume of 4 1TB SAS MDL drives in R5) in everything other then IO and the IO loss was not great. 

Note on SATA drives some RAID levels will try to default to 8K, 16K or 32K.  Those should never be used on SATA it causes the drives to behave very weird.   Non server SATA spinners should always be set to 64K. SSDs should be set to 32K or 128K depending on its controller.   A SSD on a P400 is just about worthless as they are locked to 1.5GBs only small access size DB would see a performance improvement.  Due to the stripe issue SATA spinners should not be used in a many user (corportate) environment.

[ZoranS]

Sorry, I had read this when you responded but didn't have time to provide more info because I got caught up in another project.  Great write up! I appreciate the info.  I will be going the route of swapping the drives after offloading the data onto my SAN.