upgrading all drives in raid5 8 drive array?

Hi FikseGTS,

  I do not recommend doing this due to the complication of your drive failure recovery processes. With the drives all replaced you have to create a second logical drive so the O/S will now see 2,  3.5 TB logical drives. This new space is formatted just like any other drive. Another problem is that you'll have degraded performance as you do the 8 rebuilds.

  Here is the rub... should a member disk in one of the logical drives happen to drop offline for whatever reason, it does NOT necessarily drop the matching disk in the other logical drive. Still no problem, but if you then have a different disk go offline in the other logical drive, you are stuck, whichever disk you replace, you'll lose one or the other logical drives as you'll have two failed disks in the other logical drive. Recovery involves adding a 9th drive and doing 4 rebuilds, you cannot add a 9th drive, so you will end up having to delete and recreate one of the logical drives to recover.

 You can use a lab machine with a compatible controller to configure and format your 7 TB logical drive install the O/S and copy the data across the wire, then take the drive set to the production system and swap out all the drives (power down , remove all drives, power up enter the controller BIOS, clear the configuration, save exit, and power down, install new array , power up reenter the controller bios , select view disk when given the option, and save and exit), presto, system upgraded with a minimum of down time.

Of course I've glossed over some issues, but it might be cost effective in time and effort to do the upgrade on a second system and swap the boxes, even if you have to buy one to be able to do it.

Regards,

Warwizard

You should read this before creating a raid 5 this big, an array this large has a destiny with failure. The engineers who created raid 5 had no conception of the large drives/arrays of today.

http://www.intel.com/technology/magazine/computing/RAID-6-0505.htm