Increasing HD space on Raid-5 using Dell Array Manager 1

[malyg]

I have a Raid-5 array containing both C: and D: drives.

Can I just reconfigure the array add the drives and then increase just the D:

It is currently set to basic I have read forums about having to set this to dynamic first but I still have Windows 95 pc's here that access the server.

Any help would be great.

Can I also do this on the fly.

 

[NickFerrar]

Yes this will work fine (did it myself a few weeks ago), you will need to make it a dynamic disk.

I wasn't aware there's an issue with Win95 clients accessing a dynamic disk on a server - the client should be unaware of the disk type as the server handles the file access request and passes the result to the client.

You can do it on the fly but it's best to do it overnight or at a weekend as the rebuild task is pretty intensive so it affects performance, took several hours for me to add a 2x18GB drives into a 3x18GB RAID5 array. I had to reboot when doing it but only because the PERC driver level I was at wasn't supported by the OpenManage that was installed (I had to flsh the PERC firmware then upgrade the Windows driver).

 

[malyg]

Thanks for the response.

Are you aware of any problems arrising when you convert from basic to dynamic

 

[NickFerrar]

Haven't experienced any here, I think the original advice was not to make a disk in a hardware RAID array into a dynamic disk but this doesn't seem to be the case anymore (might be worth patching your OS to the latest SP etc to in case).