RAID Configuration Help!

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Hey everyone, its been a while!

Hoping to get back into the swing of things around here, only a few thousand posts to catch up on!

Just a little question to start me off, we currently have what i've been told is a RAID 5 Configuration on our Data server (or so i've been told!) We have 3 73Gb disks on there at the moment, and are coming close to full capacity. Before we get to that stage im looking to upgrade the disks with 3 300Gb disks... how would I go about doing this?

Could I just take one disk out, stick in the new one and let it rebuild, then then second one, then the third one? Or is it more complex then that?

Apologies if its a silly question, and thanks for any help.

Paul

 

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Right... top of my head here (it would be better to phone up the customer support number for the manufacturer of your drives and ask them!)...

Due to the RAID 5 config you can technically have one of the three hard-drives die and not lose any data. If any more die then you will lose data. Because of this... replacing all three drives with larger models may not be a possibility. You can probably replace one just fine and then rebuild it through the BIOS, and you shouldn't lose anything - but this is entirely up to you.

Best advice I could give you - ring up the manufacturer and ask them the question. They'll be able to provide you with far more information than any of us could.

Qs

 

wouldnt advise taking them out and swapping them with larger ones...RAID will normally play well together when all the disks are the same, Ive seen strange things happen when you mix and match disks. You would also need to check that your RAID controller supports the disks that you are going to be swapping them out for (Im guessing you arent using software RAID).

If you dont have an option to get a new server I would backup all the data onto tape or something similar, pull all 3 of the old disks out and put the 3 new ones in. Then install the OS on the server and restore the data. If it all goes pear shaped you can always put the 3 old disks back in and you'll be back to where you started.

Make sense?

Jiggy

 

I had to use Acronis True Image w/ Uni restore and done something similar to Sparky

[added]
I done it this way so i could increase the partition size on c: to, some more information on your problem would be nice

 

I would probably just add another couple of disks to the current array, and the way to do it largely depends on the type of controller. However, if its an older RAID setup that can't rebuild the array on the fly, then I would probably back up the data and swap the disks out.

 

I think the disk size can only be set to the size of the smallest disk I think so I would guess you need a special tool (oo eerr misses) for the job

 

I would back the data up somewhere. And then i would setup your raid5 configuration to your new disks and then copy the information back to the new array. Ive got a raid 5 setup here and i cant think of any other way to do it.