Possible to rebuild RAID5 with larger hard drives?

[Alen Teplitsky]

I have a DL 380 G5 with a 6 drive RAID5 array of 300GB drives. I want to expand it with 500GB drives.

can i swap the drives out one by one and rebuild the array each time with the 500GB drives?

[anthony11]

You may have a hard time getting HP's offshored support to admit it, but yes this is possible, assuming that you're using one of the better Smart Array HBA's.

With ZFS it'd be trivial, but it's more work here.

Ensure that your HBA has the latest firmware.  You may need an SAAP [trial] license to make it work.  Research "hpacucli modify"

[Ali]

Hi Alen,

Thanks for your post.

Yes ... you can swap the harddrives with higher capacity drives provided it does not exceed the maximum storage capacity. please refer quickspecs for more info(http://h18004.www1.hp.com/products/quickspecs/12477_div/12477_div.HTML)

however, it could take long time as rebuilding takes approx 10-15 mins per GB depending on number of hard drives, BBWC, rebuilding priority settings etc.

other option that you have is to backup all the data, take out old hard drives, create array with new hard drives and restore backup.

To upgrade hard drive capacity:

1. Back up all data.
2. Replace any drive. (CAUTION: Do not replace any other drive until data rebuild on this drive is complete
3. Repeat the previous step for the other drives in the array, one at a time.
4. When you have replaced all drives, you can use the extra capacity to either create new logical drives or
   extend existing logical drives using HP ACU.

 You may also refer to Smart Array P400 Controller Guided Troubleshooting for more information capacity expansion (www.hp.com/support/hpgt)

http://h20584.www2.hp.com/hpgt/guides/select?lang=​en&cc=us&prodTypeId=15351&prodSeriesId=1121586&la...

Hope this helps,

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Aftab