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agarde

5 Posts

4328

December 5th, 2007 13:00

Upgrade diskspace in RAID5 array with different sized drives?

Hi all, I currently have a Dell PowerEdge 6600 with the built-in DAS bays for roughly 10 (?) disks or so. I have a RAID5 array that I want to expand with some extra diskspace. Currently it is using 5 slots and I have 3 empty ones, so I want to add three more drives in. The current drives are 146GB (10k SCSI) in size. I am wondering, can I use different-sized drives to upgrade the array, or do I have to use the same size? I.e. can I use 300GB drives or am I forced to use 146GB ones? Operating environment is Windows Server 2003 SP2 Enterprise with the onboard PERC 4/DC.

warwizard55

720 Posts

December 5th, 2007 16:00

Hi agarde,
 
  Short answer: yes you may use the 300 GB drives.
 
  Long answer: but the additional capacity on each drive that is unused should NOT be used to create another array, due to trying to recover from both arrays being degraded, in the case where it's different drives in each array that are offline. Without an available slot for yet another drive, your recovery would entail destroying the piggy backed array, and recreating it and restoring the data. With a slot it just needs 4 rebuilds, two on each array.
 
Regards
warwizard

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