Raid 5 Array out of space

[Bill Timmons]

I'm running out of drive space on a server (W2K) with 6 (36GB) drives. Is it possible replace the drives with a 72GB drive(one at a time)and let the raid array re-stripe the data to the new drive. After all the drives have been replaced, use the raid utility to take re-configure the drive array and gain the extra space. I did this once before on a netware server but haven't done it in several years. Any help or reference to some documentation would really be appreciated. Thanks

[Mike Naime]

That really depends on the raid controller. I think that the answer is NO. In most instances on the older controllers, the raidset will only use the amount of space on a spindle that is equivalent to the smallest member in the raidset. So, if you have 5 72's and 1 18, you would only get 18GB out of each member.

Also depending on the controller.. metadata about the LUN (Like total size) is established when you create and initialize the LUN. so if you replace all of the drives with larger spindles, it still thinks that it only has the old amount of space.


Can you supply more detail about what hardware you are dealing with? Then you might get some more exact answers.