Increasing the size of an array on a PowerEdge 1850

[Nick_Parrott at Dell.com]

Hi Mark,

Hoping someone doesn't correct me on this, but sadly NO is the answer. RAID 5's can be expanded via a "reconstruct" process, however doing what you mentioned below with your RAID 1 will just leave XXGb space free on both physical drives. The RAID adapter cannot resize the array to use all the space. Backup, delete, re-create and restore.

If the 1850 had space for an additional disk, it would be possible to reconstruct to a RAID 5 (3 physical disks required) then fall back to a RAID 1, however there is a lot of complexity here - only the right management software can do this, which involves having it available on the OS, lots of load on the RAID adapter, so not something to be done during production hours, and also the physical space requirement for 3 disks in the machine - not an option on the 1850.

Looks like a backup/delete/re-create/restore is the only way :-(

Regards,

Nick

-----Original Message-----
From: linux-poweredge-bounces at dell.com [mailto:linux-poweredge-bounces at dell.com] On Behalf Of Mark Watts
Sent: 28 July 2008 09:24
To: linux-poweredge-Lists
Subject: Increasing the size of an array on a PowerEdge 1850


Hi,

I've got a requirement to increase the size of the volume on an 1850 running two 73GB disks in a raid-1 mirror.

Is is possible to rebuild onto larger disks (pull one disk out, rebuild, swap the other, rebuild) and then see more space on the array?

Any other options?

Cheers,

Mark.

--
Mark Watts BSc RHCE MBCS
Senior Systems Engineer
QinetiQ Applied Technologies
GPG Key: http://www.linux-corner.info/mwatts.gpg