HP Proliant ML335 (G5) - Best way to upgrade HD storage space

[Jerry Redmon]

Currently we have an HP Proliant ML335 server with four 146GB SAS drives in a hardware RAID5 setup.  The array is divided into 2 logical drives which are drive "C:" and drive "D:".  See attached diagram.

 The array controller is a "HP Smart Array E200i".   All of the array controller GUI based utilities are installed.  The OS is Windows SBS2008.  

We are running out of space on the "C:" drive and need to increase our storage space.  We are trying to determine the best way to do this.    We intend to double our total drive space.

One way, according to the HP Smart Array E200i manual would be to add new drives and run the "Expand" and "Extend" utility in the "Array Configuration Utility " (ACU).  However, the manual states that the expansion works at the speed of about 1GB per 15 minutes.  For our server which has about 430GB total capacity, this would take about 4.5 days!

Another way would be to use our Windows SBS2008 full backup and do a "bare metal" recovery to new drives.   To me this seems like the best solution, however, my concern is that the recovered image would be looking for different hard drives and this would create a problem.  Also, would the HP array configuration utility automatically readjust for different hardware?

Any suggestions from anyone who has experience with doing this would be greatly appreciated.
  

[Dennis Handly]

>the manual states that the expansion works at the speed of about 1 GB per 15 minutes.

Did it says that's when the system is under a heavy load and faster when idle?