topic How to upgrade disk size in Disk Enclosures

How to upgrade disk size

Amaraa — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 06:41:44 GMT

Hi all,

I have DL 380 G4 with configured 4 disks with RAID 5.
4 disks size is 140GB and we need to increase size 300Gb while system is running.

140Gb 4 disks are using for novell storage service.

Any reply appreciated

Re: How to upgrade disk size

Haggisnneeps2 — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 11:24:52 GMT

So you already have 4 disks in place? Are these 140GB disks? Or is 140GB what you have after RAID5?

You could just buy 1 single 300GB disk and stick that in to save you the bother.

If you have 4 disks in then you also have 2 more slots free (unless your OS is mirrored on the first 2 drives)

Are you just looking to upgrade 4x 140GB drives to a single 300GB partition? 4 drives will give you 420GB in RAID5

If all 4 disks are currently being used for other stuff then you will have to move this data somewhere else first

More info required !

Re: How to upgrade disk size

Amaraa — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 00:15:47 GMT

4 disks are already mirrored RAID5 and
146.8Gb x 4 RAID 5 size is 300Gb.

Now i want to like below

300Gb x 4 RAID 5 size is 600Gb

411Gb is mounted to novell pool

/dev/evms/BGCUBPOOL1 411G 196G 215G 48% /opt/novell/nss/mnt/.pools/POOL1

FS, HOME volume is mounted to POOL1

UBFS 250G 133G 118G 54% /media/nss/FS
UBHOME 150G 62G 89G 42% /media/nss/HOME

Data is growing up everyday.

Re: How to upgrade disk size

Steven Clementi — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 05:28:25 GMT

"4 disks are already mirrored RAID5 and
146.8Gb x 4 RAID 5 size is 300Gb.

Now i want to like below

300Gb x 4 RAID 5 size is 600Gb

"

I am not to sure about the math here, but 4 300GB disks in a RAID5 array should yeild @900GB usable space (more like 840GB), not 600GB.

Now, since you are running novell, I am not exactly sure this works the same way, but on a Windows Server... expanding is easy.

The hardware upgrade is the same, I know that for sure. You would basically do this...

1. Remove 1 drive and replace it with a 300GB drive.

2. Let the array controller rebuild the drive on the new disk. This should be automatic.

3. after the rebuild completes, replace another disk and wait for it to rebuild.

4. complete this for the rest of the disks.

5. Once all the disks are replaced and rebuilt... your newly available space is ready for allocation. You can either...

a. Create a new logical drive with the space, present it to the OS and build a new volume out of it.

b. extend an existing logical drive to give it more available space.

Now... the part that I do not know about is if Novell allows for you to increate the size of a volume. You will need someone else to answer that part. My initial thoughts are no, and the way to go would be to create a new volume and move some data, spliting the load, or mounting it as part of an existing volume, if that is possible.

Steven