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21373
August 24th, 2016 12:00
Adding another drive to existing array without losing data (Raid 0)
I have a Dell PE2850 With a Raid 0 with a virtual drive 0 as follows:
Array Disk 1:0 33
Array Disk 1:1 33
Array Disk 1:2 68
In the Open Manage Array Manager in backplane 1 it shows
Array Disk 1:0 33
Array Disk 1:1 33
Array Disk 1:2 68
Array Disk 1:3 68
How can I add array disk 1:3 to the array or to a new array without
losing the vital data that I have on this drive? If this cannot be done can I assign the drive
as a non-raid drive and then be able to access the data on the drive?
OS is W2K3 Server Enterprise and a Perc 4 controller.
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ejn63
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87.5K Posts
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August 24th, 2016 15:00
You cannot, with RAID 0 -- you'd need a RAID array with redundancy (RAID 1 or 5 among them) to be able to swap in a drive without data loss.
RAID 0 stripes data across all the drives - there is data that's stored only on a single drive - once you remove it, the array is destroyed and the data is lost.
The only thing you can do with RAID 0 is back up the entire system, rebuild the array and restore the backup. The backup MUST be done before any drive fails (or has failed).
isosa
10 Posts
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August 25th, 2016 08:00
Hi,
I went into the Array Manager Ctrl-M and added the 1:3 68 to a new Array in the Configuration of Array. Once I configured the array as a separate one it allowed me to select it as a logical drive. I then restarted and it recognized it. I was then able to use disk management to label the drive partitions and access the data. I know that I am still using Raid 0 but I hope to virtualize this drive in W2K12 and backup the VM so I can do a restore when needed.
Hope I explained this properly..
Thanks for answering so promptly.
ejn63
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87.5K Posts
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August 25th, 2016 12:00
From your description, the added drive was not and is not blank - if that's the one with the OS on it, just make an image of it and restore it where you need to (there are any number of commercial packages that can do the job).
What you CANNOT do is remove a drive from a RAID 0 array - it will destroy the existing array and that single drive contains only part of the data from the system. There is no redundancy - data is spread over all the discs in the array.
reely
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August 25th, 2016 20:00
What is the effect of adding two more ssd's in addition to the 2 current ones which are raid 0? Could they be larger than the original 2 drives?
ejn63
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87.5K Posts
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August 26th, 2016 04:00
There's no point in adding SSDs to a hard drive array - and no point to adding larger drives, as the array is limited in speed by the slowest and smallest drive.
That is, if you try to RAID 0 a 500G drive and a 1T drive, the total size will be 1T (half the capacity of the larger drive will be unused).