Expanding disk on MSA70

[Allen Z. Evans]

I'm having trouble expanding the disk space on a RAID 5 MSA70 unit. I've added one 145GB SAS drive and tried adding the drive to the array, but it still just says unused space. I've attached a screenshot.

The unit has gone through its transforming stage, but now it just shows up as 'unused space'

How do I expand the disk? It doesn't give me the option to do so, it's grayed out.

[gregersenj]

Its a 4 step process.

1. Install drive in enclosure (Physically).

2. Expand Array (using ACU add drive to array).
Once the new physical drive has been added to the Array, you can extend the last Logical drive, if you have multible Logical drives on the Array. Or you can create a new logical drive on the empty space.

3. Extend logical drive (Using ACU).

4. On the oprating system you now need to extend the partition. Or you can create a new partition.

The operating system will not see more space untill you have performed step 3.

BR
/jag

[Allen Z. Evans]

Thank you so much for replying!

I've actually managed to expand the array per your instructions, but I've come across something odd.

Under disk management on Server 2008 R2 it shows 1093.61GB on the F: drive which is the MSA70 array, but in my computer it shows the F: drive as the old amount of space 956GB. It hasn't asked me to expand in Windows, like it usually does but the space is correct under management.

I see a message here on the MSA70:
Logical drive state: Background parity initialization is currently queued or in progress on this logical drive. If background parity initialization is queued, it will start when I/O is performed on the drive. When background parity initialization completes, the performance of the logical drive will improve.

Does that have anything to do with it?

[Allen Z. Evans]

I've noticed on the MSA70 that the Info tab for the Logical Drive shows Parity Initialization Status at 'In Progress (1%)' for the last 2 hours.

So it looks to be locked up, but not sure. Should I reboot the MSA70 array? At this point, I'm worried about data corruption.

[kris rombauts]

Allen,

this is a background process that only gets time to run when I/O to the MSA70 is low or none. Normal I/O gets priority over this process at all time, don't worry about that.

Expand your disk in Windows disk manager and you'll be able to see the new size. It might be that the small area is almost not visible if the graphical view is proportional to the size of the disk in disk manager. You can run the diskpart utility on the command line also to extend the disk.

[Allen Z. Evans]

Thanks Kris!