Array Expansion

[acl03]

I have a DL380. One of our arrays contains six 299.9 GB drives. I want to expand this array with about 14 additional drives.

In testing, I had an older HP server with a 5i controller. I had three 72GB disks in Raid 5, and when I expanded it to include a 4th, it took almost 3 days for the expansion to complete (with the controller having "expand priority" set to high.

The DL380 I want to do the real expansion on has a 6i controller.

Can i expect similar results, or should I expect this to take weeks?



Thanks,
Andrew

 

[jfrantz]

Andrew,

The expansion will be faster if you have the battery-backed write cache installed. If you do add that many drives, I suggest migrating to RAID 6 which gives you the ability to loose two drives simultaneously. If it's a critical machine, using one or two drives as hot spares is a good idea.

-Jeff

 

[acl03]

Is there a way to convert a raid5 set to raid 6? On my array controller (SmartArray 6400) i see the option to make a new raid6 set out of my new drives, but how can i convert my existing array to raid 6?



Thanks,
Andrew

 

[acl03]

Also - what happens if i lose a drive during expansion, or if the server reboots due to a power outage?



Thanks,
Andrew

 

[acl03]

I expanded a Raid-5 1.90 Terabyte volume by adding 2 additional 300 GB drives. I used one of the drives to make the array raid6 (ADG). I assumed that the other drive would bring the size of the volume to 2.2TB. The most it allowed me to do was 1.99TB. Is there a size limitation that may be preventing me to add more space?



Thanks,
Andrew

 

[acl03]

Ok it does look like the smart array 6400 has a 2-terabyte max logical drive size.

Is there a way to make windows see a few different logical drives as 1 drive letter?



Thanks,
Andrew