Question from a newbie on Netraid

[james glass]

I recently inherited an hp lh60004 (6x 700mhz xeons, 12x 36 gig scsi drives, 4x power supplies). This is being used mostly as a hoby machine; I intend on consolidating several servers I have into this one, and using it as a file/ftp/home automation server.

I installed windows 2003 server enterprise on the machine. When I did this, however, I only had 6x scsi drives. I have them set up as a RAID 5 array.

I've since added another 6x drives. I'd like to rebuild the array without recreating it and reinstalling win server. I know this is possible with other RAID software (I have a highpoint SATA raid on another machine where I've done this several times), but how do I do this on netraid? I've seen some references on Hp's web site to something called netraid assistant which looks like it may be helpful, but I can't find a link to download it.
Thoughts?

[james glass]

OF course, I meant that I have an netserver *lh6000r*, not a netserver lh60004.

[Sean T. Craig]

Hi James,

For most of the NetRAID controllers, you can use NetRAID Assistant found at this link:
http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/SoftwareDescription.jsp?lang=en&cc=us&prodTypeId=15351&prodSeriesId=74580&prodNameId=19774&swEnvOID=226&swLang=13&mode=2&taskId=135&swItem=ns-12645-1

I'm not sure exactly what you're trying to do. Are you planning on expanding the existing RAID-5 array to incorporate the 6 additional drives or are you planning on making a separate array? Ideally, what I would do is use 2 drives in a RAID-1 (Mirror) for the O/S, and use the rest in a RAID-5 configuration. Keep in mind that the more drives you use in the RAID-5, the more potential there is for problems. For example, if you have 10 drives in a RAID-5 configuration, and you have a multiple drive failure, you could potentially lose 300GB of data but if you split it up into 2 RAID-5's, the potential damage is halved. It is also a good idea to have a hotspare or 2, so for me, I would do 2 drives in a RAID-1, 4 drives in a RAID-5, 4 more drives in a RAID-5 and 2 hotspares.

Check out the utility and write back if you have any problems.

Good luck,

Sean T. Craig Sr. C.E.T., M.C.P.