On 4 Feb 98 at 21:10, James Kerr wrote:
> I am new to RAID, but I managed to put together a system with an
> Compaq prolient array with 4 4.3 gig UW drives after I had set it
> all up, installed the OS, I played with the drives taking one out
> and then putting it back in and then rebuilding it, no problems with
> that, but now the customer asked me to add another drive to the
> array, so my question is, is it possible to add another drive to the
> array without having to kill the old pack and define a new one, is
> there a way to increase the size of the pack without losing all the
> data in the existing drives, TIA
If you're able to rebuild a drive after taking it out, I assume you
are probably using RAID 5, delivering about 13GB of storage. And I
assume that the customer's desire is to increase that to about 17GB.
[There are other ways to use an additional drive; as, for instance, a
hot spare. That will depend primarily on your RAID controller.]
At the moment, the data and ECC information are spread across four
drives, such that any one can be recreated from the other three.
There's no trivial way to rearrange that structure to spread the
information across five drives. Killing the old and building a new
is probably the only way. [It would be convenient to build the new
array, and then copy the data from the old array to it, but it would
also probably be expensive....]
David G
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