adding a 4th drive to a RAID 5 on a PE R420 with PERC H710 Mini not possible?

Question

I tried to follow the tutorial at this Spiceworks thread, but perhaps it's not apples to apples. We put the H710 with the hope of adding disk space to the existing RAID 5 without having to reinstall. I have the "reconfigure" option available in the OMSA but the only option I'm provided is to convert to a RAID 0. I didn't see any option to achieve this in the ctl-r during the POST reboot. The only option I see is to make the 4th drive a Hot Spare. The R420 only holds 4 drives and we're already at capacity. I'm hoping these screenshots help illustrate what I'm trying to do and if it's possible. @DELL-Chris H, hoping you can come to the rescue...

Only RAID 0Reconfigure step 2Reconfigure step 1

Hot spare

DELL-Joey C · Accepted Answer

Hi there,

Would you be able to unassign the spare drive out from hot spare assignement. Then proceed to check the steps at the virtual disk, drop down menu reconfigure. Are you able to select the extra drive in the drive selection in reconfigure option. From what I can see in your screenshot, only 3 drive were selected from and to.

MassGroupText · Answer

That was it! I must've missed this option before when I made it a Hot Spare, or I was in the iDRAC. It's reconstructing now.

With the 1,675.50GB size, I take it it'll be a while. Progress is still 0% after a few minutes.

Reconfigure

MassGroupText · Answer

OK the reconfiguration completed. Is a reboot required? We run Fedora 31 and XFS file system and I don't see the extra space with

lsblk
NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
sda 8:0 0 1.7T 0 disk
├─sda1 8:1 0 1.9G 0 part /boot
└─sda2 8:2 0 1.6T 0 part
├─fedora_newserver-root 253:0 0 279.4G 0 lvm /
├─fedora_newserver-swap 253:1 0 15.5G 0 lvm [SWAP]
├─fedora_newserver-var 253:2 0 186.3G 0 lvm /var
├─fedora_newserver-usr_local 253:3 0 186.3G 0 lvm /usr/local
└─fedora_newserver-home 253:4 0 1006.3G 0 lvm /u/erdos

It's not showing in Gparted either:

Gparted Gparted

2,5 TB 2,5 TB

DELL-Joey C · Answer

Hi,

Unfortunately, we do not have Fedora support on PowerEdge, so I may not have any info to provide a solution for you.

Based on my opinion, it might because of the filesystem that is registering the array size that previously installed. You probably may need to look into some thing to extend it's partition. Alternative, seek help from Fedora support.

MassGroupText · Answer

I was able to get the answer at my post at ServerFault,

PowerEdge HDD/SCSI/RAID

adding a 4th drive to a RAID 5 on a PE R420 with PERC H710 Mini not possible?

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