Changing RAID configuration on PERC H310

Question

I have a Power Edge T420 with a PERC H310. Current configuration shows one disk with RAID 0 on controller 0. That disk has the OS partition (Windows Server 2008) and a data partitition.

There are two other disks not in any RAID array. Those are plugged into external hot-swap slots though.

That leaves 5 slots (8 slots total minus the 3).

What we want to do is 2 things:

Convert the RAID 0 array to RAID 1 for redundancy.

Create a RAID 10 array for data use.

Really, in a perfect world we'd go to two RAID 10 arrays but that seems overly complicated given what's in there ...

So: Can we add one disk that matches existing RAID 0 then convert controller 0 to RAID 1 without any intermediate data copies (obviously we back up but no copies needed to get from RAID 0 to RAID 1).

Then, can we put 4 larger disks in the other 4 slots, create a RAID 10 array of 4 disks on controller 1?

Then when done do our copies from non-RAID to new RAID 10, etc.

Any issues with that? Any downsides to doing it on a PERC H310?

This is an older machine and older Windows OS and we'd like to go to larger disks (4TB or more). I'm guessing I may need a BIOS and/or Windows update to do that? Or is the PERC H310 limited in terms of disk size?

Dell-JimmyP · Answer

Hi,

Your plan is doable. As you mentioned, be sure and back up your data before proceeding. Downside with the H310 is that it does not have cache, so there can be some performance issues. During the background initialization, you may see some performance issues as well.

Here is a link on RAID Level Migration http://www.dell.com/support/article/sln305744/dell-poweredge-how-to-expand-or-extend-a-virtual-disk-?

Please send a private message with your service tag to ensure we have all appropriate information on your system.

Let me know how it goes.

Thank you,

PowerEdge Hardware General

Changing RAID configuration on PERC H310

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