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HDD Upgrade

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by lamar.heard

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I'm running out of room on my file server, and have 3 80GB drives to replace 3 18GB drives installed. Outside of rebuilding a new file server with the new drives, how would I replace the drives with minimum downtime (one is the system drive)?

4 replies

by house

Backup and replace data for minimal downtime.

If you want to go crazy...

Disk mirroring. Raid level 1 allows you to create an exact duplicate of your drive dynamically while it is running. Of course, you would have to suffer some downtime to set this up.

Mirror one drive to another, let it run, and rip the cord out of the old one...the new drive will take over. It will take significant research on your part and might not be the best way. Plus you will see a new kind of hell associated with the boot.ini and partition size on your new drive. Probably not a good idea.

Just backup and replace data. Simple and easy.

by sgt_shultz

hmm 3 identical drives. is this raid? are you replacing it with raid? if it is 3 discreet volumes and you just want to dupe 'em onto a new drive how about the utils available on new drive mfg website? which you would run from a boot disk...i don't think the file system would matter but it won't work if you have a raided drives now. see support.microsoft.com 'replace hard drive' and 'ghost' and post more info if you still need help...

by weavexi

i suggest you build a new file server with the new drives + latest hardwares that enable faster disk access time + use file/directory replication software = more space and better disk performance with no downtime.

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