increase disk space in RAID 5

[bentech]

Hi, we have in school a Proliant ML 350 G6 with Windows 2008R2 installed on it. The disk array (raid 5) contains 4 disks of each 300 Gb (Hot Swap, SAS 10K).

Now our problem; we are running out of disk space and want to have a bigger raid 5 array with disks of 600 Gb each.

Can anyone give me some advice and/or procedure how to change to bigger disks in a running system without loss of data?

Thanks for your help.

Ben.

[opg70]

What kind of disk controller do you have in that server?

Normally, with a SmartArray controller you can just install one by one the new bigger disks (replace on of the 300G with a 600G, wait for the array to rebuild, then replace the next one and so on) - once the last one is replaced you would have a bigger array.

Still, I would suggest backing up the data before doing this - just in case something goes wrong.

[Woonings]

"Normally, with a SmartArray controller you can just install one by one the new bigger disks (replace on of the 300G with a 600G, wait for the array to rebuild, then replace the next one and so on) - once the last one is replaced you would have a bigger array....."

Uhmz ??

No way, if you take out a single 300Gb harddisk from a RAID, and replace it with a 600Gb the

RAID will rebuild like it was a 300Gb. You do not gain anything with that.

So just forget that.

Alex

[waaronb]

opg70 is correct. You really can replace one drive at a time with a larger model. Wait for it to rebuild each time, of course, before doing another one.

Once all 4 drives are replaced with 600GB drives, you go into the array config and expand the array into the extra space that's now available. If you have a single RAID 5, then you're using 900 GB of it before, and you can expand it to 1800 GB.

Once the array itself has been expanded, you need to do the same in the OS and expand whatever partition you want so it's using the new space.