Replace all drives in RAID 5 array

Question

Hi,   I'm in the process of upgrading the capacity on an older PE2600 unit with a PERC 4/Di controller and 3 disk RAID 5 array. Adding additional drives will give more capacity but will also waste a lot of space on the new drives because they are much higher capacity.   I'm wondering if I can just replace the 3 existing drives with the 3 higher capacity ones? Is this possible whilst maintaining logical drives? Could I simply swap the old drive with a new one and then reconstruct the array - then repeat this for the other drives?   The documentation is pretty limited on this so any help would be appreciated.   Cheers.   Ben

at5147 · Answer

Two things first of course, make sure you have a backup and then make sure the system is up to date, including any management software such as Array Manager or Server Administrator.

Here is a link that should help in this area:

http://www.dellcommunity.com/supportforums/board/message?board.id=pes_hardrive&message.id=25670#M25670

In this case you would remove 1 drive at a time and allow each to rebuild before removing the next one. That will give you the unallocated RAID space.

bdaileyau · Answer

Thanks at5147.

navissa · Answer

This was posted a loooong time ago, so I just wanted to make sure the answer is still "current".

I have two SSD's in RAID1 and 4 HDD's in RAID5. I would like to upgrade the RAID5 array and use 4TB instead of the 1TB installed. I guess I can just unplug one drive at a time and the system will rebuild itself? Did I understand that correctly?

How do I know my software is up to date? I know I would not search for "Array Manager" and "Server Administrator", correct?

Thanks.

PowerEdge HDD/SCSI/RAID

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