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Re: Replace Raid 1 disks with smaller SSD's

 
Chris Peden_1
Occasional Advisor

Replace Raid 1 disks with smaller SSD's

I have a X1600 Storage Server. I have two 250GB drives in RAID 1 as the boot drive. I would like to replace these drives with SSD's which are of course smaller in capacity.

It doesn't appear that I can break the mirror and re-mirror to a smaller drive....does anyone have a good way to do this? Could I ghost the drives to the SSD's?

thanks,
Chris
11 REPLIES 11
Chris Peden_1
Occasional Advisor

Re: Replace Raid 1 disks with smaller SSD's

I should also mention I have extra's bays open and I do have the controller licensed for the advanced features.
Johan Guldmyr
Honored Contributor

Re: Replace Raid 1 disks with smaller SSD's

Hm..

I've never tried this but how about:

1/ Create the mirror with the SSD drives (array2).

2/ Then boot on some kind of live-CD and copy from array1 to array2?

As you're not attaching them to a new controller, you shouldn't run into problems that the OS doesn't have the drivers. You may run into problems that the boot table isn't pointing to the right place.

I'm not sure if this is possible either, but can you make the boot drive smaller? So that the SSD drives fits? Just bear in mind that resizing arrays can take quite some time.
Chris Peden_1
Occasional Advisor

Re: Replace Raid 1 disks with smaller SSD's

I am considering. Breaking the mirror offline and making it a single raid0 disk, and then making a ghost image of it.

Then installing the SSD in its place and ghosting the image back to it.


Thoughts?
Johan Guldmyr
Honored Contributor

Re: Replace Raid 1 disks with smaller SSD's

So - does your ghosting solution work when you make a ghost of a larger disk to put it on a smaller disk?
Chris Peden_1
Occasional Advisor

Re: Replace Raid 1 disks with smaller SSD's

Yeah I have used Symantec Ghost previously on other systems to ghost bigger drives to smaller drives.

Johan Guldmyr
Honored Contributor

Re: Replace Raid 1 disks with smaller SSD's

Then you should be fine then?

Is your X1600 fully populated? Is that why you have to replace the drives like this?
If you have more disks - why don't you put the OS ghost onto the other disks instead?
Chris Peden_1
Occasional Advisor

Re: Replace Raid 1 disks with smaller SSD's

Its not fully populated currently but will be. Lets say the mirror I have currently is ArrayA and I put the two SSD's in and create ArrayB, can clone the data. can I then destroy or pull ArrayA and boot from B?

The OS is Windows Storage Server 2008.
Johan Guldmyr
Honored Contributor

Re: Replace Raid 1 disks with smaller SSD's

Hey, should work as long as the mbr comes a long and make sure boot.ini reflects the change as well.

I hope you have a backup before you start doing this.. If you do, maybe it would be easier to use the backup?
Chris Peden_1
Occasional Advisor

Re: Replace Raid 1 disks with smaller SSD's

Finally found what the "Move Array" command does and if it works on smaller drives.

As of v8.50 of the ACU

"# Applicable only with the appropriate SAAP License Key installed:

* The Move Array operation now allows the user to move an array to physical drives that are smaller than the original physical drives, provided that all the data in the existing logical drives will fit into the new array"

I have the SAAP License, so the current drives on in bay 1 and 2, I can put the new ssd's in 3 and 4 and use this command it appears. Offline of course since its my boot volume.