Upgrading hard drives on LSI Megaraid
I have a server with an LSI Megaraid 9260-4i raid card.
Right now there's 4x 2TB Seagate Constellation ES.3 drives. We need to upgrade it to 4x 4TB Seagate Constellation ES.3 drives.
What I'm planning to do is take a backup image of the server, then shut it down, remove the 4x 2TB disks, install the 4x 4TB disks, and restore from the backup.
If something goes wrong, can we safely assume that we can stick the 4x 2TB disks back into the system in the correct order and get the old array back online? Or does removing the disks permanently destroy the array?
Right now there's 4x 2TB Seagate Constellation ES.3 drives. We need to upgrade it to 4x 4TB Seagate Constellation ES.3 drives.
What I'm planning to do is take a backup image of the server, then shut it down, remove the 4x 2TB disks, install the 4x 4TB disks, and restore from the backup.
If something goes wrong, can we safely assume that we can stick the 4x 2TB disks back into the system in the correct order and get the old array back online? Or does removing the disks permanently destroy the array?
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rindi
The RAID metadata is stored on the disks. The location of the slot they are in shouldn't matter, so you don't even need to put them in the same slot they were originally in.
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Shouldn't matter about UEFI since they can have more than one virtual drive on the disk group, so a small MBR virtual drive for the OS and a big GPT one for data normally works out pretty well. They probably have more than 2TB at the moment unless it's two RAID 1s.
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Shoot I didn't even think about MBR vs GPT....
I misspoke, I actually have 4x Seagate Constellation ES.3 1TB SAS drives, in a RAID10.
My current drive configuration is a single 2TB logical drive presented by the RAID array to the OS. The OS has it partitioned with MBR, with 1x 160GB partition, and 1x 1.66TB partition.
If we move up to 4x 2TB hard drives, I will definitely run into partition sizing issues with MBR, and it will have to be converted to GPT. That might make things a little messy....
So from what I'm hearing here, on an LSI MegaRAID card you can remove the hard drives, wipe the configuration of the RAID card (or even replace the entire RAID card with a new identical model), then stick the hard drives back in, import the RAID config off the hard drives, and your data will survive?
I misspoke, I actually have 4x Seagate Constellation ES.3 1TB SAS drives, in a RAID10.
My current drive configuration is a single 2TB logical drive presented by the RAID array to the OS. The OS has it partitioned with MBR, with 1x 160GB partition, and 1x 1.66TB partition.
If we move up to 4x 2TB hard drives, I will definitely run into partition sizing issues with MBR, and it will have to be converted to GPT. That might make things a little messy....
So from what I'm hearing here, on an LSI MegaRAID card you can remove the hard drives, wipe the configuration of the RAID card (or even replace the entire RAID card with a new identical model), then stick the hard drives back in, import the RAID config off the hard drives, and your data will survive?
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You don't have to convert to GPT to use the bigger disks, you can create a virtual drive on the new disk group that is exactly the same size (sub-2TB) and restore to that, then use the MegaRaid utility to create a second virtual drive. You would end up having to use the 2nd virtual drive as a different drive letter though so would have to split your data from D: over new D: and E: so it's not an ideal workaround.
Let's hope it get corrupted.
you mean not get corrupted?