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Dell T310 PERC H700: What can I do to improve RAID configuration?

I inherited this T310 running Server 2008 R2 a while back. It recently started reporting bad blocks in virtual disk 0 which caused me to look more closely at the RAID configuration. I was able to clean up the bad blocks using the OpenManager Server Administrator and that seemed to work fine. The REAL problem is the way the RAID virtual disks were initially configured: three physical disks, EACH configured as a stand alone RAID0 volume! So, NO disk redundancy whatsoever. VD0 is the OS, VD1 is data1, VD2 is data2. Data2 has nothing on it at all. My question: Without breaking the system, will the H700 allow me to delete VD2 and add that physical disk to VD0 and convert VD0 to a RAID1 mirror? Is there any way to do this without breaking the system? I also have another spare disk that has never been installed in case that helps. Does adding another physical disk as a hot spare to VD0 in its single-physical-disk configuration do anything useful? Any ideas on how to improve the fault tolerance of this machine without breaking it would be appreciated. Thanks.

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DMTechGrooup

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tcianflone

ASKER

So, sounds like a Clonezilla project, unless there's any other input?

Gerald Connolly

Add the spare to Vd0, if all it contains is the OS then it can easily be rebuilkt, surely its Vd1 - the data that is more important?

You could of course backup everything and combine all 3 into a single RAID-5 volume which is then partitioned into C: ad D: and then your data can be restored.