bts86
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Is it possible to shrink a hardware raid?
Have a server with raid 5 on a dell h310 raid controller. It has 4 1TB drives and all of the storage has been allocated to 1 virtual disk.
The problem is the disk is formatted MBR and therefore has a 2 TB limit.
Is there a way to shrink the array without reformatting the entire server so that i can create a second virtual drive with the remaining storage? Or a way to convert MBR to GPT so i can extend the existing partition?
The problem is the disk is formatted MBR and therefore has a 2 TB limit.
Is there a way to shrink the array without reformatting the entire server so that i can create a second virtual drive with the remaining storage? Or a way to convert MBR to GPT so i can extend the existing partition?
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If it were my own server, that would sound like a great idea.
I'm probably just looking at backing up, reformatting and restoring.
Although, gparted website says it supports hardware raid. I might attempt this after backing up before i format. http://gparted.sourceforge.net/features.php
Has anyone ever tried this?
I'm probably just looking at backing up, reformatting and restoring.
Although, gparted website says it supports hardware raid. I might attempt this after backing up before i format. http://gparted.sourceforge.net/features.php
Has anyone ever tried this?
Gparted only supports HW raid in the sense that you can run it against a target device that is presented by a RAID controller. This won't solve your problem.
GParted works to resize partitions - it can't resize RAID volumes. It supports hardware RAID, in that as long as it can see and talk to the RAID controller to read the partition tables, it can resize the partitions on disks managed by a hardware RAID controller. If it didn't support hardware RAID, then it would never see any disks or partitions to work with.
ASKER
I understand now. Thanks for clearing that up
But why not think outside of the box? Get 2 rather inexpensive SATA SSDs, configure host-based software mirroring and let them serve as the boot disk. This will give you a nice performance boost and you can put some scratch tablespace in the free area. SSDs don't care about vibration so you can surely find some place to mount them inside the system (Like where the CD/DVD drive is).