We have a server that is a couple years old and is running SBS 2003. It has 3 147GB Serial Attached SCSI drives configured in RAID 5. It is then broken down into 3 partitions. Unfortunately the C partition is only 20GB and is completely full. The other 2 partitions (one for exchange, one for all other data) are also starting to fill up. We have external drives for the unimportant stuff...but everything critical needs to be on this RAID and we are out of space. What I'd like to do is replace the 3 147GB drives with 3 300GB drives (which would be plenty of space and last us until it's time to replace the machine.)
I have gone through various forums, browsed posts on EE, and talked to other system administrators to get some suggestions. I've heard "use Ghost" and I've heard, "just create a backup, replace the drives and partition them, and restore the backup" etc. My concern with Ghost is that I need the partition sizes to be larger and I'm not sure if that would be an issue or not. I've also seen a suggestion to just remove one of the drives and replace it with the new drive...wait a certain amount of time...then do the same with another drive...until they are all replaced. Then resize the partitions (this doesn't sound right to me.)
I'm sure there are multiple ways to do it but since I've never done anything like this on a machine running SBS I'm looking for all the help I can get - I want to do it the best way the first time with minimal downtime. I'm not saying none of the previously mentioned methods are the right one but I just want to make sure. I want to increase the size of all 3 partitions and I want everything to work exactly as it does now only with more space. Thanks in advance for any help getting me to that point!
