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My server has two 72GB drives. I want to upgrade them to higher capacity drives without losing the data. Can I simply replace the hard drives one at a time and wait till rebuilding is done?

Mat
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Ruel
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  • Two drives can't be in a RAID 1+0 configuration, that requires at least four drives. Make sure you're really mirroring and not striping before doing anything, and take a backup. – Mat Sep 22 '13 at 09:29
  • You should add more context to your question, as the answer depends entirely upon the hardware and software configuration of your system. – ewwhite Sep 22 '13 at 11:39
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    Vote to close. THis is product specific, is not professional level (the answer is in the documentation for the raid controller, which is not even mentioned in the question). 2 reasons per the FAQ the question should not be here. – TomTom Sep 22 '13 at 12:46

2 Answers2

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Since you mentioned that you were using an HP ProLiant server and a Smart Array P400i RAID controller, I can give an answer specific to your configuration.

You can replace the disks one at a time with larger drives. This will result in "unallocated space" in your drive array once the drives rebuild. You can either extend the existing logical disk to fill this space, or create a second logical drive.

See: What are the good ways to migrate a RAID array to bigger disks?

Community
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ewwhite
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Yes, you can do this and you won't lose any data (unless there is a disk failure while doing it). However, once it is done, you will have to somehow resize the array; hopefully your controller supports this. Then, you will have to resize the partition and the filesystem, which is usually possible but depends on your filesystem and whether the volume is a boot volume.

Falcon Momot
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  • Thank you for your quick response. The controller is Smart P400i, not sure if it supports resize the array... It has 2 partitions in a volume, one boot partition and the data. Can I do the resizing using Disk Management in Windows? – Ruel Sep 22 '13 at 10:37
  • You will be able to resize if you are using NTFS, if I recall, using the MMC. – Falcon Momot Sep 22 '13 at 14:21