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January 28th, 2016 21:00
Upgrading RAID 5 array with a larger hard disk because of running out of space
I have a Dell PowerEdge 2970 server with a PERC 6/i RAID controller that has 4 physical drives installed to Connector 0 (2 more drives are installed on connector 1).
Originally each drive was 250GB in size, but quite a while ago I replaced 2 of the drives with 2 new 500Gb drives (one actually physically failed).
After the replacement, the controller rebuilt the two new drives but only allowed access to 250GB of each of these drives. I have lived with this up until now.
Now I have run out of available storage space on both my boot partition C and also on my data partition D (both on the same virtual disk). Windows 2008 Server and my installed apps are complaining.
I just replaced the two original 250Gb drives with 2 new 1TB drives. The RAID controller has rebuilt the array and I can boot to Windows fine. But...
The problem is that I cannot seem to figure out how, on each physical drive on Connector 0, to increase the "Available RAID Disk Space' from 250GB to the full physical sizes of each drive. I have explored the limited help in the RAID configuration utility that I run when first booting (CTL-R) but cannot seem to accomplish this.
Can anybody help? Thanks!
DELL-Chris H
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January 29th, 2016 06:00
Scandiaman,
The issue you are seeing is that the raid controller, when given a larger drive as the original, will rebuild the replacement drive the same size as the drive sizes in the original configuration. Hence the 250GB.
Now to confirm, from your description it sounds like you currently have 2 1TB drives, as well as 2 500GB drives within the Raid 5 currently, is that correct?
The suggested route to take would be to backup the data, delete and reconfigure the array as 500GB for the drive sizes, that is due to the fact the 500GB are the smallest drive in array. The reinstall and restore data from backup.
Another option is rebuild the 500GB/1TB drives with 2 additional 500?MB1TB drives, giving you 4 1TB drives. Once all the drives match you will see the additional space, which you can then configure into another virtual disk and expand in the partitions. Now be advised, that in the case that you have a drive failure, there can sometimes be issues.
theflash1932
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January 29th, 2016 08:00
If you create a second array across the disks using the newly available space, you can't "expand the partitions" using that space. You could convert the disks to Dynamic and span them, but that is NOT recommended. EITHER configure a second array with the new space (this will be presented to Windows as a separate "disk") ... OR backup the data, configure larger RAID 5, restore data, expand partitions.
RAID expansion by replacing disks with larger ones is not supported on the PERC 6 and is only available starting with the PERC 7 (H700), with updated firmware, and for specific setups.