As RAID 0 is not redundant, it is impossible to "rebuild" a RAID 0, so setting the drive as a Hot Spare will not work.  You must "reconfigure" your RAID 0 to a RAID 1, by adding the second disk.

Thanks for the reply - I'm indeed a newbie with RAID controllers, so I'm probably going about it the wrong way.

When you say ""reconfigure" your RAID 0 to a RAID 1, by adding the second disk", how exactly could I do this - is there a link to some info/manuals that could guide me through these steps?

What I'm trying to achieve is to make the C-drive redundant (convert from RAID 0 to RAID 1) by adding a 2nd disk, but I'd like to achieve this without having to delete the VD and starting from scratch.

Most of these functions for PowerEdge servers come from OMSA. I'm not sure OMSA will install on a workstation (it has a different raid management/monitoring solution). I use it for the onboard raid sas controller on my T7500, but I haven't tried it with a PERC6i to see if it offers raid level migrations and things like that.

Edit: as you are new to raid, you may want to check out the article from wikipedia about raid: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID.

Dev Mgr has a good point ... this being on a workstation - although the same card as used in Dell servers - has some limitations:

- OMSA (the management application that allows direct interaction with the controller and drives) will not install on a non-server, nor will it install on a client OS (XP, 7), and OMSA Live will not run on a non-server.

- RAID Storage Management is the management application for workstations/client OS's, but, if I remember from another thread, it cannot do advanced functions, such as a reconfigure.

I also do not think this is possible from within the CTRL-R utility.

If RAID Storage Management does not work and it can't be done from CTRL-R, you will need to clone/backup, delete the RAID 0, create a RAID 1, then restore.

Thanks everyone for the feedback.

Indeed, I could not find any possibility to do a raid level migration from within the Ctrl-R utility (hence the post in this forum).

I will read up on (and experiment with) the RAID Storage Management, as I would like to avoid the hazzle of deleting the Raid 0 and starting from scratch again.

It seems that it would be such an obvious piece of functionality to offer, so I'm not clear on why it's not included in the Ctrl-R utility ... maybe an RFC for the good PowerEdge people out there :-)

Thanks again for the info.

I noticed the following in the Storage Manager User Guide (p.25): "You cannot change a RAID 0, RAID 1, or

RAID 5 configuration if two or more virtual disks are defined on a single disk group. (The Logical view tab shows

which disk groups and disk drives are used by each virtual disk.)"

I assume this is case (I have 2 VD's, which are both RAID-0 on the same PERC 6/i controller). However, since I have a 4 TB NAS, it would be easier for me to pump the data over to the NAS, delete the second VD and then attempt to reconstruct the first VD by migrating from RAID-0 ro RAID-1.

What is unclear (could not yet find the answer in the documentation) is whether I will be able to re-create the second VD in RAID-0 configuration if the first VD is now in RAID-1, but I suppose it makes sense that the PERC 6/ would support different RAID levels between separate VD's.

I will continue reading, and then give it a try with the RSM (and report back my findings in the thread).  

You don't have multiple VD's across the same disk group.  You have multiple VD's across multiple disk groups.  Disk group 1 is disk 0, which is also your single-disk RAID 0; disk group 2 is disks 1,2, which is your two-disk RAID 0.  

An example of what it is talking about would be if you had two 1TB disks, configured a 100GB RAID 1 VD across those two disks, then using the additional space, created a second RAID 1 VD across those same disks; you would have two VD's on the same disk group.  This used to be really common, then was discouraged, then brought back again with the availability of large drives (think 6x1TB disks - a single RAID 5 VD would be too large for Windows to handle as a boot drive - it could only use 2TB of it)).

The PERC will support 64 VD's, so you can have as many as you want.  What you do to VD0 will NOT affect VD1.  When you put different VD's on the same set of disks is when you run into problems.

Are you also going to add a drive to VD1 - is it really a RAID 0 too?  If this holds your user data, you should know that there is no redundancy to a RAID 0 ... if one drive dies, it's all gone.

Storage Manager User Guide (p.25): "You cannot change a RAID 0, RAID 1, or RAID 5 configuration if two or more virtual disks are defined on a single disk group. (The Logical view tab shows which disk groups and disk drives are used by each virtual disk.)"

Yes, you can create multiple arrays at different RAID levels on the PERC 6/i. That section of the guide is referring to sliced arrays. A sliced array is when you have more than one array across the same disks. For example, if you have 2x1TB HDD's and you had a RAID 1 that used 500GB of space and a RAID 0 that used the remaining 1TB of space across those drives.  That would be an example of a sliced array. It is not possible to reconfigure a sliced array. You do not have sliced arrays, so you don't have to worry about that.

Here is the section regarding the reconfigure process from the OMSA 6.5 user's guide. It is listed as Virtual Disk Task: Reconfigure:

Thanks

OK - got it, thanks for the explanation on the disk groups.

Did not yet have time to experiment with the RSM, but will plan this in for the weekend.

Indeed, VD1 is a 2-disk RAID-0, it's main purpose being to serve as disk space for video editing. As I'm using (relatively) cheap SATA 7200 rpm drives (instead of SCSI disks), I'm using RAID-0 to maximize the disk throughput and to reduce the risk of I/O limitations when running back and forth on the video timeline. 

I'm aware that there is no redundancy, but since I'm running daily backups against the NAS, I would never lose more than a days worth of work in case of a disk crash.