Increasing the size of an array on a PowerEdge 1850

[Nick_Parrott at Dell.com]

I can quite believe it, back in the 18/36Gb SCSI disk days,
re-constructs took forever (very intensive process) and now, with SCSI
disks (same speed.. U320?!?!) we're doing it with 146/300Gb disks..
Agreed, backup and restore is faster. Some people would rather
reconstruct though..


-----Original Message-----
From: linux-poweredge-bounces at dell.com
[mailto:linux-poweredge-bounces at dell.com] On Behalf Of Terry Gliedt
Sent: 28 July 2008 18:16
To: linux-poweredge-Lists
Subject: Re: Increasing the size of an array on a PowerEdge 1850

Mark Watts wrote:
> 
> 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?

I had a less than satisfying experience trying to do this. I wanted to 
add additional drives to a PE2950 (increasing from 4 to 6 drives on a 
PERC/5i controller). A Dell tech told me that the BIOS could not add 
these drives, but if I used OMSA, it could be done.

We waited two months for a quiet time. I backed up the 2.5TB of data 
(twice) and start OMSA doing it stuff.

32 hours later it finished... only to find it had trashed all the data.

I had to re-install the system and restore the 2.5TB. In the end, I 
would have been far far ahead to just follow my instinct and 2 months 
ago, back up much less data, reconfigure the RAID and do the same thing.

Could have been done in half a day rather than making the machine 
unavailable for almost four days.

As always YMMV   Good luck.

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