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We've got a Dell T610 Server with SBS 2008 on it, running Exchange Server, SQL Server Express, DHCP, Active Directory, Sharing Files and Printers, etc.

We currently have (4) Seagate Savvio 15K 146GB hard drives in RAID 5 on a PERC6/i RAID controller. There are two separate Windows partitions on a single Logical Drive. The first partition (Disk0) is 100GB and holds the Operating System and applications. The remaining space (about 450GB) is the second partition (Disk1) and contains all of our shared data.

Recently both partitions have dropped to about 15% free disk space so we are forced to add drives. The server has room for 8 of these 2.5 SAS hard drives.

Unless I change my mind, I plan to buy some new drives and reconfigure the server so that we will have a RAID1 array with (2) 450GB Seagate Cheetahs and a RAID5 with (6) Seagate Savvio 146GB 15K drives.

We're currently using Windows Backup to backup to USB 2.0 External hard drives. Is it possible to restore a Windows Backup to drives that are larger than original? Does Windows Backup extend the partitions to match the available space for that logical drive?

HK1
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1 Answers1

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Restoring that will be no problem. The RAID controller is abstracting away the details of the disks so, effectively, you're just restoring onto larger disks.

I'm not finding documentation of how or if the volumes will be automatically resized to fill the new disks during restore, however Windows Server 2008 is very friendly about allow you to grow volumes to fill available free space using the Disk Management GUI (including the running boot volume, which wasn't possible under prior versions of Windows) so I wouldn't worry about it too much.

Evan Anderson
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