add logical drive to RAID using larger drives

[tato386]

I have a DL360 with a P410i and all 8 drive bays filled using 146GB SAS drives.  I would like to create another logical drive to add an extra volume to the OS.  From what I can see, this should be fairly easy by replacing all the drives in the array, one at a time and allowing time for each to rebuild.

However, what if I only replace 4 drives out of the 8?  Would I be able to do something with the free space on the 4 replaced drives?

Thanks,
Diego
 

[cykVM]

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@tato386 wrote:

However, what if I only replace 4 drives out of the 8?  Would I be able to do something with the free space on the 4 replaced drives?

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That won't work, the additional unallocated space on those 4 replaced drives won't be visible to the system.

Although the replace one-by-one method  for all 8 drives should work, I ALWAYS would personally backup all data and start from scratch configuring the new RAID volumes. If you mess up RAID configuration or a rebuild during the swap process goes wrong you may loose everything.

Which RAID-level do you run on the 8 drives?

[tato386]

I am using all 8 drives in RAID 5 with no hotspare.

Rgds,

Diego