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Regarding IBM eserver adding new hard drives to raid

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by muiezahmed

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Hi,
I have IBM eserver x series which has two U320 73.4GB SCSI Hard Drives 32P0727, and it hardware raid enabled for mirror, its installed with windows 2003 server, as i am running out of low disk space in C drive i required to add up more space in C drive, this server is the main server in our organization, and i doesnt want to take a risk of doign anything, so can you suggest me if i get 2 new same configuration harddisk and add in hardware raid will it add one hard drive for c and other for mirror is it possible if not possible then suggest me how can i do this.... its very urgent guys..

Thanks in advance

5 replies

by bart777

You have a couple of options though.

1) Add 2 new drives to the system and set them up in a seperat RAID 1 Mirror. Then move data from C to D. Allso move any programs that you can and possibley the swap file. This will free up the the C drive space.

2) Get some larger drives and and rebuild the server using either a large RAID 5 or just get larger drives and replcae the 73Gb drives you have now. The problem with this method is that when you rebuild the RAID it will wipe the drives.

by muiezahmed

Hi bart but what u saying i suggested that to my IT department but they say it is possible, any way i cannot keep the system down as it is very important system so can i use some partition manager to expand the drive i have some free space in D drive but will it effect mirror and SQL Database which is also installed in D and i have some programs installed in D drive,

Thanks

by bart777

I wouldn't!
Now that you tell me the server is running SQL you have opened a whole other can of worms.

Is it possible to move the partitions.
Yes.

Is it possible to add a disk to an existing RAID mirror to expand the drive space.
Not without rebuilding the RAID. This will wipe the drives.

There are programs out there that will allow you to repartition a drive, like Acronis, but They can be tricky to use. Also since you have a mirror, you're stuck.

The only way I can think of would be to buy 2 larger drives. Break the mirror. Rebuild the mirror onto 1 of the larger drives then fail the first drive and replace it with a larger disk. That would then give you more free space that you could partion. It's possible but not recommended.

The only true way to do it is to add drives and rebuild the array as something other than a mirror. RAID 1 is stuck with 2 drives. If it were RAID 5 you might have been able to add more disks to it.

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