Remove drive from raid 5

[kwoodfield]

I added a 4th hard drive to 641 raid 5, the windows 2003 os does not see the added space.
I would like to remove the drive and set it as a hotswap spare. Has any one been able to do this?

[kris rombauts]

Hi,

it would be safer if you read the documentation befor doing these kind of actions.

Their is no way you can remove a disk from a raid aray like raid5 without making it degraded, so your are stuck now and have to leave the disk in their or recreate the entire array (means backup data, delete array, recreate array with 3 disks again and and restore data).

The reason why you do no tsee the extra disk space in Windows is because you have to first extend the logical drive you have.
This is a second step that needs to be done after you expanded the raid5 by adding a disk.

The raid5 array is at the virtual level and transparent to the OS, the logical drive is more at the OS level like a normal, standalone disk.


So bottom line, you cannot remove that disk and make it a hotspare if you already expanded the raid5 from 3 to 4 disks.

Easiest solution is buy an extra disk if you really need a hotspare.

And if your goal is only to have the extra disk space available in Windows, then simply extent the logical drive now by using the ACU utility.

HTH

Kris

[kwoodfield]

Thank you

That answered my questions.