Can two additional drives be added to an existing raid array without losing data or having to backup, restore and rebuild?
Accepted: "debuggerau:
As far as expanding the group, you will need to backup and restore the data so you can rebuild the new raid set. It will not retain your data."
Assisted: "rickhobbs:
If you have the current BIOS and Drivers, you CAN expand the volume without losing data. However, you cannot expand the logical drive(s) (C:, D:) without a third party utility like Acronis Disk Server Suite or other server aware partition manager."
The above accepted and assisted solutions in a related post seem to conflict.
Can two additional drives be added to an existing raid array (PERC 6/i SCSI - PowerEdge 2950 - 4 slots used, 2 slots free) without losing data or having to backup, restore and rebuild? And, will the Dell OpenManage software perform this task from within windows or is Ctrl-r into controller configuration utility on POST required.
ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION
membership
This solution is only available to members.
To access this solution, you must be a member of Experts Exchange.
ASKER
Accepted: "debuggerau:
As far as expanding the group, you will need to backup and restore the data so you can rebuild the new raid set. It will not retain your data."
Assisted: "rickhobbs:
If you have the current BIOS and Drivers, you CAN expand the volume without losing data.
Understood:
3rd party application will be required once space has been added to RAID.
Prerequisites:
BIOS should be at most recent level
Various sources describe steps from the straight forward to the very complex methods of expanding the raid.
OMSA - Reconstruction Wizard
or
PERC/CERC 6/I BIOS Configuration Utility
I'm looking for the simplest (preferrably Dell supported) method of adding two additional disks (of the same size as the existing) into the PowerEdge 2950 (Perc 6/I Raid Controller) existing RAID 5 array without data loss. This server is critical and allowable downtime is extremely limited so there's no time for trial and error with it.
Some blogs indicate expanding storage space cannot be done through the Perc 6/I BIOS Configuration Utility but by the OMSA only. Again...the conflicting information.