Question

Increasing the capacity of raid 5

Asked by: smiffy13

My customer has a raid 5 array based on 4 x 300Gb drives, 1 of the drives is a hot fix, so the 3 live drives gives them 600Gb of usable space. The drives are a few years old and they need more space, so they've asked me to replace the disks with 4 x 1Tb drives. A couple of websites I've looked at indicated that this was a feasible proposition. The system is equiped with 4 hot swap drive bays. So I've replace each drive in turn, each time letting the array rebuild itself. Each time I replaced one of the drives the rebuild took between 20 - 22 hours. So now all the disks have been replaced and the array has finished rebuilding itself for the last time, but it still says the usable space is 600Gb. Disk management in windows doesn't show any additional unformatted space. So I rebooted the system, pressed ctrl-G and had a look at the RAID configuration, which confirms that while it can see 4 x 1Tb drives, the host drive size remains at 600Gb. There doesn't seem to be anyway to increase the size of the host size.
Perhaps someone here can confirm; the only way to increase the size of host drive is to delete the existing host (and lose all the data) and set up the whole array as new, then restore all the data from a backup. Hopefully someone can respond quite quickly, as I'm returning to the site in about 10 hours time, presumably with the bad news!

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Asked On
2008-03-23 at 05:13:55ID23262521
Tags

Intel

,

Raid Controller

,

SRCS14L

,

RAID 5

Topics

Computer Servers

,

Computer Hard Drives

,

Storage Technology

Participating Experts
2
Points
500
Comments
5

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Answers

 

by: simsjrgPosted on 2008-03-23 at 05:47:11ID: 21189403

After all the drives are swapped and rebuilt you will need to extend the partition to utilize the new unused space. I recommend Acronis Disk Director Server as I have used it a lot in the past and it has proven to be a valuable tool.

http://www.acronis.com/enterprise/products/diskdirector/

 

by: smiffy13Posted on 2008-03-23 at 07:08:58ID: 21189671

For Acronis to work wouldn't I need to see the unused space in the windows disk management utility? I think my problem is with the RAID management utility. This runs before windows starts up, it is reporting that the host drive size is 600Gb not the 2Tb I was hoping for. I'm a bit reluctant telling my customer to spend $500 on a piece of software that doesn't fix the issue. I can see where Acronis could help if I needed to resize the partition into unused space, but windows isn't seeing any unused space.

 

by: 2PiFLPosted on 2008-03-23 at 09:15:31ID: 21189947

It looks like you'll have to start over.  Once the array is full of drives  there is no option to extend it.

Check out section 4.3.7.1

http://download.intel.com/support/motherboards/server/srcs14l/srcs14l_tps.pdf

 

by: simsjrgPosted on 2008-03-24 at 09:34:10ID: 21194658

>> his runs before windows starts up, it is reporting that the host drive size is 600Gb not the 2Tb I was hoping for. I'm a bit reluctant telling my customer to spend $500 on a piece of software that doesn't fix the issue.

Understandable... you can however sign up for a free demo for 21 days
http://www.acronis.com/enterprise/download/ADDSrv/

 

by: smiffy13Posted on 2008-03-31 at 06:13:43ID: 31442109

Thanks for your answers. I thought I'd have one last look at the options before commiting to the rebuild from scratch. I discovered that right clicking the existing host drive in the windows "Storage Console Plus" software, there's an option to "convert the unused space to a new host drive" this option seems to be undocumented in the manuals. Anyhow, I clicked it, and a new host drive appeared, it took approximately 22 hours building the drive, so now I've got the existing 600Gb drive and a 1.4Tb drive. My customer seems happy with this arrangement. I copied all their data to the new drive yesterday, they've been using the new host drive today.

20120131-EE-VQP-002

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