DL360P Gen8 P420i Question

[rmp5s]

Good evening:

I have a DL360P Gen8 on the way and it has a P420i RAID controller that I plan to use to implement RAID10 on the server.  (There are only 4 drive bays.)

I'm just wondering:  If I put in four 3TB drives and configure RAID 10 and want to add larger capacity drives down the line, would I be able to just remove a drive and insert the new drive and allow the array to rebuild?

I've never been on the user end of this particular hardware...usually I'm building the stuff.  

Thank you!

[Zakour]

Hi

RAID 10 is usually used in small capacity hard drives. it can be used in you case but you will lose lot of space and money.

Best Solutions these days is to have for exemple 2 Mirrored Hard Drives + 1 Hot Spare for the Operating system and big capacity hard drives (at least 3) in a RAID 5

RAID 10 Pros and Cons:

Pros:

• RAID 10 is fast!  Since it uses both Striping and Mirroring, you get the best of both worlds and can get to your data quickly.
• It’s robust and fault tolerant.  RAID 10 allows for 2 disk failures and the recovery time is fast.

Cons:

• RAID 10 uses half the space of the raw storage.  So for example, if you had 1TB of raw storage, a little less than 500GB would available as usable storage.
• RAID 10 requires a minimum of 4 hard drives.  For some people, this can get a little pricey.

[rmp5s]

Thanks for the reply!

I've been weighing 5 vs 10 and decided on 10 as, since I plan on running rather large drives and only have 4 bays to work with, I don't mind taking the hit on space.  Because they're just normal (aka "slow") 7200RPM spinners, I want the speed increase 10 affords, even if it's at the cost of space.

According to raid-calculator.com, if I run four 6TB drives in 5, I get 18TB of space with a bit of a boost to read speed, but nothing to write speed while going with 10 gets me only 12TB of space but I get a boost to both read and write.  4x and 2x, respectively.  

This wasn't really my question, though.  I am wondering how the actual controller would act if I have the array built, then swap out a drive for a bigger one.  I think it will just rebuild the array on the bigger drive and carry on, but I'm wanting to verify.  I will probably only have three 3TB drives to start with so I want to ensure adding larger drives will be as easy as I'm expecting it to be.

[Jimmy Vance]

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@rmp5s wrote:

Good evening:

I have a DL360P Gen8 on the way and it has a P420i RAID controller that I plan to use to implement RAID10 on the server.  (There are only 4 drive bays.)

I'm just wondering:  If I put in four 3TB drives and configure RAID 10 and want to add larger capacity drives down the line, would I be able to just remove a drive and insert the new drive and allow the array to rebuild?

I've never been on the user end of this particular hardware...usually I'm building the stuff.  

Thank you!

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When you replace a disk with a larger disk the array will rebuild, but it will rebuild using the original capactiy. You will need to repelce each disk individually and wait for the rebuild process to complete before replacing the next disk.  After you do this will all 4 disks you can then expand the array or create another logical drive to reclaim the additional space.  Once this is complete you can now modify the partition tables of the OS to increase space.  When you decide to do this you will need to detemine if it will be quicker to backup, install new disks and restore, or attempt to do the online expansion.