Change disks Disk Array

[AlexG]

Hi everybody,

we have a Proliant DL380 G3 with a Smart Array 5i with 3 volumes. One of the volumes has 2 disks (RAID 1+0) 72 Gb and we would like to change the disk to 2 disks 300 Gb.

What is the best way?. Can I take the "secondary" and add the new disk, wait until replication is done and then do the same with the "primary"?.

Thanks,

Alex.

[Jaime Bolanos Rojas. · Accepted solution]

HI AlexG,

NO not that's not a good idea, when you build a Raid 1+0 you create a specific size for that drive, well to make it short, you will be wasting the extra space on both disks.

I would copy everything to backup, recreate the array with new disks and then recover from backup.

Regards,

Jaime.

[Uwe Zessin]

Well, that's a fairly 'standard' trick. Of course:
- you don't have RAID protection during the recovery (2x, because you replace 2 disks)

- after the second disk drive has rebuild, you have unallocated free space at the end of the disk array.

- you can either create another logical disk or you can expand the existing disk. The expansion will take quite some time...

- after that, the partition(s) still have their old sizes.

[AlexG]

Thank you both.

Alex.

[Steven Clementi]

As suggested, you can swap the drives. The thing you need to keep in mind after the fact is how you will extend your partition(s).

What OS are you running?

If you want to just create a new Logical Drive, then you have no worries. If you want to extend existing Logical Drives, then you have to consider different options depending on what kind of data is on that logical drive.

Do you want to just create a new logica ldrive? or are you looking to extend an existing logical drive? or both?


Steven