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Upgrade Disks RAID-5 System

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by wpcc

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I recently began supporting an office with a Dell Server. It has W2k Server 2.8 Xeon 1.5GB Ram.
It also has 4 Hard Drives in a RAID 5 config.
They are Seagate Cheetah 37GB SCSI drives attached to a PERC 4/SC Controller. Logically there are 2 drives, C: 12GB and D: 90GB.
I am not all that familiar with RAID 5. Therefore I'm not positive what I'm looking at.
The big issue is this, the company wants to upgrade them to 73GB drives because of space constraints.
I'm not sure where to begin.
The server is in production 24/7.
Any suggestions?
Thanks, GP

4 replies

by bfilmfan

You will need a full backup of the data as you will need to reconfigure the array to install larger drives.

Note the server WILL have to be downed to upgrade the drives.

Put the drives in.

Reconfigure the array.

Install the OS.

Install what recovery agent software is needed.

Recover the data.

Done.

by wpcc

Basically, what you're telling me is that I have to rebuild the server from scratch, then restore the data. Is there any other way of adding storage space? Perhaps adding another 36GB drive?
Thanks GP

by bfilmfan

Generally the RAID array is set on a BIOS chip on the disk controller card. If you are changing the array, you will have to reconfigure it.

You may be able to add a drive to the existing array, but I've seen far too many cases where the entire array blows chunks after you have done this. I'd advise you to have a full backup just in case. And the server will have to be rebooted to add that disk to allow the array to reconfigure with the new array information.

If you are changing ALL the disks, which was what I thought you were doing, you will indeed have to rebuild it.

Another potential solution would be to look at network attached storage, a storage array network or to add a whole new array controller to the system; but, that is probably severe overkill for your issue.

by wpcc

Thanks for the info...I was hoping for a miracle.
NAS is a bit of overkill.
Gordon

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