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kheaneyFlag for United States of America

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Adding another disk just for storage.

I have 2 disks in my Proliant DL380 which are mirroring each other.  I need to add another disk for storage.  I do not want it part of the RAID just a disk for storage.  I installed the disk but the Server running Windows Server 2016 Data Center does not recognize it.

Thanks for the help please!
Avatar of Tom Cieslik
Tom Cieslik
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Just go to controller setup and create separate Raid 0 using this one single disk.
Then disk will be available for Windows to create partition on it
Of course, don't put any important data on the single drive.  Server storage should be redundant unless you really don't care about losing it.
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Member_2_231077

The controller setup program is called HP Smart Storage Administrator (SSA) if you can't find it.
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ASKER

If I choose that the disk become part of the present Array will it erase all the data on the other 2 drives?
If you add it to the current array it will not erase data, it will convert the RAID 1 to RAID 5 and re-stripe the data across all three disks. This data shuffling can take hours but it is done in background so you can still use the server while it is doing it. After that there is a 3 disk array with spare space on it which you can use to either extend the current logical disk or create another one, If the new disk is larger than the old ones you only gain as much space as the smallest disk. Note you need a working cache battery to add disks to an array.

Note also RAID 5 is not advisable with high capacity disks (over about 600GB) due to slow rebuild time and chances of a bad block or second disk failure when one fails.
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ASKER

Sorry for the delay as I had another emergency.  I will give it a try in the next 2 days.  Thanks!
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