My mailserver has 5 x 73GB Hot swappable SCSI drves and a cold? spare
if I replace them with 5 x 300GB drives one at a time , wil this give me extra space or do i need to do anything else ?
(knowledge not great on raid stuff)
would probably depend on what software / hardware controller is managing the disks, and whether it’s able to “grow” or “extend” a raid5 on the fly.
in my experience if you replace the first 75gig with a 300gig, the raid management will create a 75gig partition/slice on the 300g. likewise for the rest of the replacements, which would mean you’d end up with 5x75gig slices on your 5x300g drives… not very useful.
Best bet would be to confirm the capabilities with the vendor of said raid-management (veritas?, hardware supplier?) - if it’s just windows doing the raid then I very much doubt you’ll have any option but to transfer the data elsewhere, replace the drives, re-create a brand-new raid5 on the 300g’s, and transfer the data back.
[QUOTE=Spaceboy;412025]would probably depend on what software / hardware controller is managing the disks, and whether it’s able to “grow” or “extend” a raid5 on the fly.
in my experience if you replace the first 75gig with a 300gig, the raid management will create a 75gig partition/slice on the 300g. likewise for the rest of the replacements, which would mean you’d end up with 5x75gig slices on your 5x300g drives… not very useful.
Best bet would be to confirm the capabilities with the vendor of said raid-management (veritas?, hardware supplier?) - if it’s just windows doing the raid then I very much doubt you’ll have any option but to transfer the data elsewhere, replace the drives, re-create a brand-new raid5 on the 300g’s, and transfer the data back.[/QUOTE]
everything is HP here
HP Smart Array 641 on a Proliant ML370 G4
Fairly entry level card , look like i might have to add another and bang the 300GB ones in some slots…
SA 641 supports ‘Online Capacity Expansion’ so you could replace the disks one at a time and then expand the capacity of the array. You would then need to expand the partition(s) into the new space in the array.
Alternatively, if you don’t want the hassle of the migration, having replaced the disks you could create more arrays in the free space.