RAID 1 Expansion - ProLiant DL360 Gen9 - P440ar

[ctaylor-SAM]

We have a ProLiant DL360 Gen9 server with a Smart Array P440ar Controller.  We currently have two 240GB SAS SSD drives in a simple RAID 1 configuration.  We would like to increase the total drive capacity in the server and are looking increase our available storage.  What options are available to expand the mirror?  Is moving to RAID 10 a better option or easier migration?

This server is an ESXi host, so SSA will be performed offline.

[TTr]

If you add 2 or 4 same size SSD drives, you can combine the new drives with the old ones into a large RAID10 array or create more RAID1 pairs. There are no published results for different types of RAID because they depend heavily on the number of drives and the controller. I think RAID1 would be the fastest with SSDs.

[ctaylor-SAM]

What would the process be like to add 2 or 4 drives?  The relevant posts I have seen have been a few years old, and I haven't worked much with HP array configuration since the days of the ACU on a boot device.

1. Split the mirror
2. Remove one drive
3. Reboot
4. Add the 3 or 5 drives
5. Boot to Smart Storage Admin
6. Initialize new drives
7. Reconfigure to RAID 10

Is there an option to be able to just toss in 2 or 4 drives then boot into SSA and expand the mirror, or would we have to create additional mirrors and logical drives?

[TTr]

There are online raid expansion and raid migration features. I think you can add 4 drives to the raid1 pair and convert it to a raid10 array. Run the array configuration utility and familiarize yourself with the menus and operations.