changing from RAID-0 to RAID-1

[Freddy Van Geit]

Hi,
One of our older servers is a DL-360G1 with 2 18.2GB drives running in RAID-0.
Just a few days ago one of the drives had a minor glitch and an operator had to push F2 to get the server running again.
Although no errors occured since then I lost some faith and would like to switch to RAID-1 in case one of the drives would really fail in the near future (I only use about 7GB of disk space)
My question: is there an easy way to break the mirror and go back to 1 HD before expanding to a 2 drive RAID-1 system?

[HGN]

Hi

The mirror is going to be a hardware mirror and if you break there would not be an issue but nothing is sure, it can break during the process and would loose data, you need to be prepared for that.

Rgds

Gopi

[kris rombauts]

Freddy,

if i understand correctly, you have now a raid 0 config with 2 disks. Their is no way to split a raid 0 config (no redundancy) to convert into another raid level.
The only way is backup/restore.

The hardware raid is not aware of how much real customer data your disks contain so in theory your 2 disk raid 0 could be 100% full of data (in this case 2 * 18 Gbyte = 36 Gbyte of datafiles) so since this data is fully spread (striped) over the two disks at all time,you cannot split it up in 2 separate disks, it would corrupt the data.
Even if your raid 0 only contains a few Mbytes of data it will still not work since almost every file you write is written over the 2 disks.

Since a DL360 only has 2 disk slots, you cannot add disks to migrate from the current raid 0 to another more redundant raid level either (by adding disks) so really here you would need to backup data, reconfigure the raid to raid1 , restore data.

Pls keep in mind you can only restore the data if your total user data is less then 18 Gbytes, if not it won't ever fit on the 18 Gbyte capacity that is left when you moved towards raid 1. You mentioned 7 GBytes, so that is ok.

hope this helps,

groeten, Kris