Adding hard drives to RAID 1

[JGregory0930]

I hope I'm posting in the right forum, or at least you all can help me. I am a System Admin at a small accounting firm who has an outside consulting firm as basically our network administrators. They also handle our server upgrades. We currently have a Dell PowerEdge Intel Xeon 2.4 GHz Processor,512MB Ram, 2 - 73GB SCSI Hard Drives in RAID1 configuration running Windows 2000 Server. We recently asked teh consulting firm what it would take to get us more hard drive space as we are rapidly eating up the 73GB. Their response was that it would take "many man-days of reloading and reconfiguring our File Server, along with the investment in the additional hardware" to get the additional space. I'm hoping to get an answer if this is true or not. I have a feeling they are trying to make it into more of a job in order to get us to purchase a whole new server from them. So my question is does it really take reloading and reconfiguring the whole server just to get the addtional space?

I appreciate any help on this.

Thanks,
Jill

 

[victorv]

hi,
if you give us the correct model of your PowerEdge server,
we can be more pecise and do less supposition.

1) However suppose that your server has only 2 disks slot
and mirror is hw: you have to make an image of OS and
change your disks with a pair of greater disk, make the
mirror, restore image.
COSTS: 2 new disks (old wasted), no more 1 day of job.
If the system need to reinstall OS, is on right that days are needed, depending from what was installed before.

2) Your server has more than 2 slots and supports RAID5:
after image, you can add other 2 or 3 (depends) disks
to build a raid5 volume and rstore.
COSTS: 2or3 disks (use old) always 1 day

3) Add 2 disks to do another mirror, don't destroy OS,
also of different size, move somethings from disk c:
to new disk e:
COSTS: 2 disks and a little of services

bye