HDD additional and logical drive expansion to HP server DL380 G5

[Mjema John]

Hi,
I am running out of Space and i bought two drives for addition to Drive E which is in RAID-5

can anyone help me in procedures so that i can expand the drive E?

[TTr]

> and i bought two drives for addition to Drive E which is in RAID-5

First you have to check if your controller has BBWC so that you can add and expand the disks within the controller.

Next you use the ACU to do the following
1. Add the new drives to the exisiting raid5 array using the array expansion feature.
2. Expand the raid5 logical drive (LUN).
3. (Now the OS will see the larger disk). Expand the OS partition.

Step #3 is critical. Not all windows OS versions can do this. With some you have to use the diskpart.exe utility downloadable from Microsoft.

[Mjema John]

Hi, I cant see the BBWC? Seems my Controller doesnt have it, No option for disk expansion on my ACU. How can do it?

[TTr]

If you don't have the BBWC you can not add the drives online. You have to backup your drive E: and any other drives in that array group, destroy t he array and recreate it with the extra two drives. Then create drive e: and restore the data.

Alternatively you can create a new raid1 array with the two drives and add the space to drive E: (dynamic disk?) but I don't think you want to do that.

You should consider buying the BBWC. In addition to being able to do online array operations, you will will realize a huge performance improvement. After adding the two extra disks your raid controller will have to do additional i/o so you will need the BBWC even more.