Our current production server has 6 hd's in a RAID 10 array. Technically it's not RAID, but the new Windows Storage Spaces feature in Windows Server 2012 (think software-RAID). These six are used for storing VM servers only, the OS boots from a 60 GB SSD.
Now when I was first building this server, Storage Spaces gives you 2 different options for creating a RAID 10 array - either using a 2-way mirror or a 3-way mirror. I chose a 3-way mirror, and I'll say why: at the build time, it was unclear whether there was going to be any suitable backup available (small business budget restrictions). Also, I chose cheap-cheap SATA drives for the array (for the same reason).
I did end up acquired a nice 2 TB External backup drive from the old servers. Each of the six HD's in the new server are 500 GB. But with a 3-way mirror, I'm actually losing 4 of the 6 drives to redundancy, giving me 1 TB total of usable space. Now that we have a daily backup in place, I'd like to restructure this array to a 2-way mirror for DB performance (writes are SLOW), so instead we lose only 3 of the 6 drives to redundancy and get 1.5 TB of total space. I'm wondering the best way to do this.
My idea was to ensure last night's backup completed successfully, delete all the data from the drives and destroy the array; then we use the 6 drives to build a new array (this time with 2-way mirror) and restore the data from the backup. Would this work? Does anybody have experience with a Windows Storage Spaces backup used like this yet? This is now a production server, and I have no dev servers to play with, so I really need to get this right or risk losing all of the company's data ;(
Is there any better way to restructure said array?