Extending a RAID 5 volume

[imported_JFG]

RAID 5 with 4 70 GB hard drives. I need to greatly extend the size of the array. What's the best method to add larger drives and rebuild the Array. I know I can extend the voulme with diskpart.exe but can I somehow replace the 70 GB drives with larger ones and keep the RAID in tact? The server doesnt have room for more hard drives.

Thanks

 

[Jeff7]

Don't know the "best" method, but what I did was to just replace one drive at a time. The array automatically started to rebuild the empty drive at bootup. It took about a day per drive (160GB, upgraded to 200GB each). Then either add another partition, as the new space just appears unpartitioned, or use a utility to resize existing partitions to fill the space. I like Acronis Disk Director, though its boot disk, which is Linux based, does not seem to support my Promise SX4000 RAID card, even though it has Linux drivers available. And I believe it needs the boot disk if you want to resize the boot partition.

 

[imported_JFG]

Thanks. I think I'm just gonna image the machine, but in larger drives, configure the array & restore the images to the larger volume.

 

[mikecel79]

What RAID controller are you using? Many of them have a supported procedure for doing this type of thing.