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Adding Drives to RAID 5 - IBM System x3650

I have an x3650 with mirrored drives for the OS and HyperV host and a RAID 5 of 4 drives for my VHDs. I have two extra drives. What would be a best/recommended practice ?

1. Add the drives to the RAID 5 through the ServerRAID Manager (gui) ? I've got about 30GB of VHDs, so that would take several hours to build up the new RAID 5.
2. Save the VHDs, blow away the existing RAID 5, create a new one with the two extra drives, and copy the VHDs back ?
3. Set up the new drives as hot spares ?

The RAID 5 presently has 4 drives. I'm assuming I'll get a bit of performance gain adding two more drives to the RAID 5. A RAID 10 is also possible, but I'm more interested in performance than the best redundancy at this time.

Thanks much.
-Stephen

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Will Szymkowski

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lapavoni

ASKER

The VMs are not in production yet, so I think I'm good there. I wonder if I copy them off then delete them, then add the drives, then build up the RAID with the two new drives, then copy them back ... if that would be feasible. Thoughts ?

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Andrew Hancock (VMware vExpert PRO / EE Fellow/British Beekeeper)

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Will Szymkowski

Sorry for the confusion. RAID 10 will provide over all better performance.
See the breakdown here...
http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/raid5-vs-raid-10-safety-performance.html

lapavoni

ASKER

I decided to go with the RAID 5 with additional disks. With 6 disks, I'll lose about 15% raw space. With a RAID 10, I'd lose half. I'll most likely snapshot my VHDs and back them up to another disk. Thanks both for the useful information and links.

Will Szymkowski

Do the following...
- Move the VHD's to another location
- Destroy the current RAID5
- Add new disks
- Create RAID10
- Move the VHD's back