replacing old drives with new

[esj]

Smart Array E200i Controller with 128 MB BBWC in HP ProLiant ml 350.
Storage currently is five 250 GB drives in raid five configuration
OS is ubuntu 7.04

We want to upgrade the array to use larger drives (250 GB upgrading to 750 GB)

The documentation and notes indicate it's possible to replace existing drives in a storage array with larger capacity drives but don't indicate how to upgrade by replacing one drive at a time. I am aware of the 2 TB limit per logical drive and I also wonder how that would factor in in in upgrade process. I can think of a couple of hypothetical solutions involving incremental drive replacement and logical volume migration either to entire drives or partitions the size of the original disks. But rather than speculate, I would appreciate a pointer to appropriate documentation. I have read the controller manual and the management tool manual but neither of them seem to address this use case.

Many thanks for any responses.

[meredith shaebanyan]

Not sure w/ an e200i, but I've done the following w/ a 6i so it should work:

1.) Replace one drive with a logical capacity drive;
2.) wait for the rebuild to complete
3.) repeat (1) for each drive

4.) You should see the extra space in the Array Configuration Utility.

Shut down the server before each drive swap if you can get away with it.

[Gary Antonio Benavides]

Hi!

If you have a E200i in a ML350 Server is should be Generation 5 (ML350 G5). It is possible to do that by replacing one hard drive at the time and let it rebuild and then replace the socond one and so, even though is not recommended. My advise is to backup all the information, replace the Five hard drive and create the RAID again. There is also an HP Tool Call Physical To Proliant (P2P)or HP Rapid Deployment Pack, from a source server to a destination server.

Regards,

[esj]

thanks for the responses. It sounds like the best plan of attack is to backup, try incremental install and if it fails, shrug and reinstall. ZFS is looking like a better solution than classical raid.