Expanding Disk Space on Proliant DL360 G6

[Lyle Florence]

I have am HP Proliant DL360 G6 server running Winodws Server 2003. It is our domain controller. I currently have two 146 GB drives mirrored in the system. We have about 10% of free space left currently. I purchased a third 146 GB drive and installed in the third port. The Array software is telling me that I cannot expand since it is not the equal number of drives, but I can convert to Raid 5. My question is, should I purchase another drive to expand, or convert to Raid 5? If I do convert to Raid 5, should I go ahead and purchase another drive as a hot spare? Once I convert to Raid 5, how do I expand the storage on the logical drive? Do I do this in the array software, or do I do this through the OS? Any help is appreciated, and I will give any additional info needed. Thanks in advance.

[LuckyP_1]

For this scene you need to purchase a BBWC (Min of 256 MB), because with 3 HDDs, you can create only RAID 5, to support RAID 5 this card needs a BBWC.

If you do not want to invest in BBWC, then one more HDD can be purchased as an option.

It's all your choice.

[Jitz]

To make RAID 5 we need minimum of 3 HDD and 256 MB RAID CACHE memory.To create RAID 1 (Mirroring)you only required minimum 2 HDD,In your case you have 3 HDD and with that you can't create Mirroring, Because for Mirroring its always need even numbers of HDD. What you can do is you can migrate from RAID 1 to RAID 5.

[Kingpinkiller]

What you can do is
- buy 2 drives of 300 GB
- make an offline-image of your 2 146er´s
- the old with the new drives
- With HP SmartStart-CD,
clear the array-config (& the new drives)
create new array & LDs on the new drives,
(Raid1, Mirror, same as used before (!)
with proportional resizing regarding
the old config)
- restore your offline-image to the new drives (with resizing NTFS-Partitions)

You can use Acronis TrueImage & DiskDirector for this job, I think TrueImage meets it alone.

The old disk are for sure, you can
use them later as datadisk (mirrored :-)


(Another scenario would be to move one
partition (ie D: or E:) to a new/second
harddrives/raid, but that does not work
if your C:-drive is 146 GB and the only
one in the system :-)

Good Luck
Ralf

[Jitz]

Hi Ralf, Could please brief how to make offline image of two 146 GB in to two 300 Gb HDD,could you explain it step by step..

[leur2011]

Since you've already purchase a new HDD, what you need is to verify if you have BBWC installed in your SmartArray.

If you have, insert the HDD and use the HP Array Configuration Utility to Migrate RAID 1 to RAID5 online from the Wizard Tab. Wait until the Transformation complete, then use third party software such as Partition Magic to extend your partition. Server 2003 does support expand option if the volumes contains System OS and Pagefile. Only 2008 support expand with the system partition.