Replacing Raid 5 drives

[jstewart455]

I have 5 18 gig drives that I need to replace with larger ones. Do I need to break the original raid all together and start a new one? Or can I replace one at a time. Do I just break the Raid in Disk management within windows or do I need to do it there and in the raid utility.

 

[damjanster]

I was told that resizing RAID 5 to a larger volume is not supported. You can however do a full backup and then replace one disk after another and wait for rebuild after each disk replacement. I believe you will have an option to resize the volume after all new disks have been used. Keep in mind that with MegaRaid controllers you can only use one disk per one array (Adaptec lets you use one larger disk in two or more logical arrays).
IMHO: It just might be easier and less time consuming if you make a backup and restore to the new RAID5 built with new disks.

MCP, MCSA, MCSA+M, MCSE 2003, RHCE C4