DL380 G3 Raid Rebuild

[Ximera]

Hello
I'm working on the HP Proliant DL380 G3 with Smart Array 5i on board. I have just one RAID 1+0 (four 70GB hard drives). One of HDDs is failed now. I want to replace it but the point is that I don't have identical hard drive, only 146GB HDD. Nevertheless, new drive has the same RPM and cache size.
Can I replace my failed 70GB drive with 146GB new one for successful rebiuld?

And may be anyone can tell me how long does it take to rebuild my RAID? I've read somewhere it takes about 15 min for 1 GB of data on old RAID-controllers. Is it true?

Thanks in advance for ur answers.

[Johan Guldmyr · Accepted solution]

Hi, yes you can put in the larger disk. I believe the extra space on that disk will be unusable though.

Even newer arrays like the MSA2000/P2000 takes 15min / GB for expansion/rebuild.

[Michael A. McKenney]

RAID 0+1 or 10 works on the smallest drive sets the partition size. So adding a larger drive would not increase space. YOu would need to replace all drives and then expand within the OS. You can't expand a partition with a paging file in it. You would need to move the paging file first and then you could expand. Still very tricky to swap drives and have the arrays fail over properly. Do daily full backups. Allow 1 day for the array to fail over to a spare and stay normal. Then backup. Then replace another drive. You have to monitor it in case the spare fails. I have seen that happen.

[Ximera]

Thanks for ur help.
I don't plan to increase my RAID, I simply want to replace failed HDD.

Last question: if RAID rebuilding takes 15 min per 1 GB, the total time in minutes will be approximately 15*70 (one drive capacity) or 15*140 (RAID capacity)? I need to estimate the time my server will be idle.
Thank you.

[Johan Guldmyr]

I'm pretty sure you can replace this online without turning off the server.

[stevekat]

We recently had to replace a 500mb drive in a DL160 set up RAID 1+0, and it took 5 days to rebuild. This came out, if I recall to about 15min per GB for the physical size of the drive being replaced (probably only used physical space if your drive is larger than the one being replaced.)

Our rebuild priority was set to low. I think if you set rebuild priority to medium, this might be faster, if your production environment would not be adversely impacted by the extra resources being used by a 'medium' rebuild.

[Ximera]

Steve, Johan, thanks a lot. I'm sorry for my silly questions - it's my first rebuild :)
Yesterday I replaced my broken drive, it only remains for me to wait.

[stevekat]

Ximera, let us know your rebuild priority and how long it takes per GB. I would be curious for another datapoint.