Unsolved
1 Message
0
354
RAID 1 guidance
Hello,
I'm hoping someone can help me as I'm very green when it comes to RAID setup.
I have a Poweredge R720 with 1TB HDD RAID1 for S110 setup that I'm managing. The server went down a few months back where we had to break the mirror and remove one drive in order to restore the server from backup (long story).
Now were are running out of space on the 1TB drive and I'm looking to upgrade to 2 - 2TB drives.
1) Can I insert one 2TB drive into the empty bay and expect the original 1TB drive to copy over, then insert the other 2tb drive? Then use OMSA to reconfigure the array to include the added space?
2) Or am I better off installing one 2tb drive and copying the image over from the backup? With 1 drive and good daily backups, I can then reconfigure to a RAID 0 and use the additional bay and drive as storage? Or is this sound crazy?
Dell-DylanJ
4 Operator
4 Operator
•
2.9K Posts
1
May 18th, 2020 15:00
With a hardware RAID controller, I'd feel confident in telling you that you could safely do this.
The S110 however, I'm not sure that it will allow the reconfiguration, but if it does, I'd encourage you to double-check your backup health before proceeding. The S110 isn't a bad controller, but it had limitations and lacked the resiliency of a hardware RAID controller. It'll be more effort, but I think for long term health, the best call would be to blow out the array, and create a new one. If your budget would allow you guys to acquire a controller (an H310 would be a good starting place, but you have the H710 and H710P if you want something with more features), this would probably be a great time to consider it. I've seen them going on Amazon for around the $60 mark, and I think it would probably be well worth it. There would be some cables too, but I can't imagine those being much.
Alternatively, you can do exactly what you said at the end - create an independent RAID 0 and mount that at a new drive letter. Keep in mind that you'd have no redundancy on that drive, however.