Upgrade hard drives and configure raid 5

[Raoof]

Thank you for your usual support and great assistance torsten.

I want to let you know that, I would like to go with your previous advice of expanding the existing RAID5 and creating a new logical drive within this RAID5. I have come to this conclusion by doing some rough calculation based on the below two scenarios.

1) Expanding the Existing RAID5:

Expanding the existing RAID5 with the new 4 physical drives will give us 7 drives in total and 1 as spare, out of which 6 will be in use (of size around 876 GB).

2) Creating the new RAID5:

But if I go with creating a new RAID5 with the new 4 physical drives out of which 3 will be in use of size around 438 GB and the size of existing RAID5 with 3 drives out of which 2 is in use of size around 292 GB, gives me the total space of around 730 GB in the controller.

It means based on above rough calculation there will be a difference of around 100 GB of space in the controller.

So, I would like to expand the current RAID5 and then create a new logical drive as ‘1’ in it (don’t want to extend the existing logical drive i.e. ‘0’).

Torsten, Below commands will expand the RAID5 and will it also create a new logical drive named as “Logical Drive 1” or I have to create the new logical drive in another statement?

# saconfig /dev/ciss0 -E 1 -p 1l:1:1
# saconfig /dev/ciss0 -E 1 -p 1l:1:2
# saconfig /dev/ciss0 -E 1 -p 1l:1:3
# saconfig /dev/ciss0 -E 1 -p 1l:1:4

Thank you again for your support.

Waiting for your kind reply to proceed further with your given valuable advices.

Best Regards,

Syed.

[Torsten.]

Ok, so do now

# saconfig /dev/ciss0 -E 1 -p 1I:1:1 -p 1I:1:2 -p 1I:1:3 -p 1I:1:4

This will extend the existing arrray and take several hours.

Check the status again with saconfig/sautil.

[Raoof]

Thanks a lot torsten for the response.

I can run this below cammond now in the peak hours (8 AM to 4 PM is working hours - Saudi Arabia)? or can do it after working hours like around 4:30 or 5:00 PM. Just for safe side as it is a prodution server.

# saconfig /dev/ciss0 -E 1 -p 1I:1:1 -p 1I:1:2 -p 1I:1:3 -p 1I:1:4

Regards,

Syed

[Torsten.]

See current values:


Array Capacity Expansion Priority... 0 (low)

(IMHO safe to run the command now)

It is adjustable:

saconfig /dev/cissX-e [low|medium|high]

[Raoof]

Array Capacity Expansion Priority... 0 (low)

What should be the value of it? where we can check the value of it. Do we need to set it to high before extending the raid.

[Torsten.]

See your initial post. The status is written there.
With low priority the extend will take longer, but with minimal performance impact.