Increasing storage on a raid 5 setup

[scadmin]

Hey all. I need some help.

I have a HP DL 380 that has 6 x 34.6 gig SCSI drives in a raid 5 setup. It runs Windows 2003 with multiple paritions on it. We are going to run out of space soon and i need to inrease the storage capacity.

What would be the best way to increase the storage?

I read somewhere that i could possibly remove one of the drives and replace it with a larger capacity drive and let the raid rebuld the drive and then reallocate the extra space to exisiting partitions. Then repeat this step for each of the drives.

Is that doable? Does anyone else have any suggestions?

 

[stduc]

Hmmm I would want to test that idea first if it was me! I would imagine it might work once you had replaced all the drives though. Or you could end up with a lot of unuseable space!

Whats the problem with just backing the data up somewhere?

 

[scadmin]

i guess i could ghost it or create a full image of the partitons on the system and reload it once we reconfigure the array.

 

[zbnet]

Most RAID controllers need disks of similar - preferably identical - specification. I strongly suspect that if you had a RAID with (say) 80GB drives, and you swapped one for a 120GB drive, you're going to get 80GB of that drive used and the other 40GB wasted. So your last note is really the only sensible option: back the data up somewhere else, swap the drives for all bigger capacity, recreate the RAID, and then restore the data.