RAID Mirroring

soulo4soulo4
edited June 2006 in Hardware
Just wondering if this is possible:

I have an old server that has the c:\ drive mirrored on two 9GB hard drives. I really want to upgrade those hard drives but I want it to be quick. I also need to mention the hard drives are hot swappable.

Would it be possible to swap out one of the mirrored drives with a bigger, clean drive so the older hard drive can replicate itself onto the new hard drive? Then when that is finished, I can swap out the last old hard drive with the same size as the new hard drive? Does it depend on the raid controller?

Comments

  • KwitkoKwitko Sheriff of Banning (Retired) By the thing near the stuff Icrontian
    edited June 2006
    I'm not the RAID pro, so someone will have to back me up on this. If you swap out one drive for a larger one, it will just default to the size of the smallest drive in the array, thus wasting part of your larger drive. I believe the only choice is to back up everything and create a new array with the larger drives.
  • BudBud Chesterfield, Va
    edited June 2006
    KwitCo™ wrote:
    I'm not the RAID pro, so someone will have to back me up on this. If you swap out one drive for a larger one, it will just default to the size of the smallest drive in the array, thus wasting part of your larger drive. I believe the only choice is to back up everything and create a new array with the larger drives.

    KwitCo your right in raid 1 it would just create the size of the smallest drive. You could image your machine then you acronis or ghost to image it onto the new drive and resize it to the new drive size at the same time.
  • RyderRyder Kalamazoo, Mi Icrontian
    edited June 2006
    I third it.....adding a larger drive on the raid controller will force the larger drive to have only 9GB of its space used.
    All raid (well... Raid 0, 1 and 5 anyway) must use drives of identical size, if you don't use identical size...then all drives will be seen as a size equal to the smallest drive in the array.

    What I would do is use Acronis or Ghost to put your current array onto that larger Disk. Then once you have it on there... add another drive to the machine. You probably won't be able to create a raid array in bios...because the controller will want to initialize the drives and clear the data. If you boot to the single drive and your raid controller has software in windows...you should be able to add the second drive and tell it to mirror the first....then once you have that set....it should be good to go from there.

    Did I make sense or confuse things?
  • soulo4soulo4
    edited June 2006
    Thank you all for the replies. They were all very helpful!

    Now to convince my boss to upgrade the hard drives... :doh:
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