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January 18th, 2011 13:00
making non-raid into raid 5
I have a server (dell t310) with one hard drive in it running server 2008 r2... i would like to make it redundant with raid 5... i have purchased a raid controller and additional hard drives for this (exact same HDs)
Here is my concern.... for starters, i have never done this before (no redundancy to raid 5)... here is my plan, and please let me know if im wrong
- shut down the server after hours and put the raid controller in
- let windows install the raid controller so that it is recognized in device manager
- after windows installs the controller, download the drivers from dells website and install
- after all that is done, come in on a weekend and do a complete backup using windows server backup... back it up to a formatted external hard drive
- after backup is done, shut down the server... put the other 4 drives in, reboot and go into the raid controller interface...
- once in the interface, configure the drives for raid 5 with hot spare
- reboot and boot off the server 2008 r2 disc and restore the image that we backed up
now here is where i get concerned... everything should restore normally despite it being raid 5 now since its still 1 logical drive...
has anybody ever done this?
thanks for your time
Dev Mgr
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January 18th, 2011 20:00
Your plan (in combination with the PERC H700 info) should work with one reservation; what are your drive sizes? Your boot virtual disk cannot exceed 2048GB (2TB) in size.
So, if your drives are 750GB or larger, you'll need to carve the raid 5 into 2 virtual disks (I assume you wanted to make a 4-disk raid 5 instead of a 3-disk raid 5 with a hotspare) where the first virtual disk will be your bootdrive and is probably best off at 100GB or so, and the second virtual disk can be the total remainder of the raid 5.
theflash1932
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January 18th, 2011 15:00
Which RAID controller do you have?
Aquamelli
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January 18th, 2011 16:00
flash - it is a perc h700
Aquamelli
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January 18th, 2011 21:00
DEV MGR - thank you for the vote of confidence... i wasnt sure if my plan was completely out of whack or if it actually was feasible
The hard drives are 250GB 7200 RPM - so according to your post, we should be good! I am going to try this next weekend and will make sure to update this thread for future reference
Aquamelli
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January 29th, 2011 21:00
I completed this tonight and everything worked out perfectly!
Dev Mgr
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January 31st, 2011 13:00
That's good to hear.