Help me understand my raid1

[csc]

I have two 1 tera drives on a pci card in raid1. If I run out of space, can I just remove 1 of the drives and wait till the card tells me its dead then replace and rebuild with a larger drive, then do the same for the other? Will I get the full amount after I switch both or will it still be 1tera?

If that is not correct, how can I upgrade to larger drives? Also, are my drives readable by any sata port or limited to the pci card?

Thanks for any info.

 

[Blain]

Will I get the full amount after I switch both or will it still be 1tera?

I don't know if you can do it or not, but you might try this...
* Pull one of the 1TB HDs.
* Install a larger HD and rebuild the array.
* Pull the 1TB HD out of the array.
* Use a partitioning utility on the larger HD to increase the capacity.
* Add in a matching larger HD, and rebuild the array.

 

[garritynet]

I am not how your array is set up, but why not just "soft" break the RAID in your card bios or whatever software you are using?

I am not completely sure if this is possible but it would be the first avenue that I would investigate-

1.Break the mirror in the system settings.
2.Format your second drive and set as "simple volume"/"single drive".
3.Create backup image of your primary drive onto the secondary drive.
4.Remove primary drive.
5.Install new drive.
6.Write image to new drive.
7.Remove second drive.
8.Replace with new drive.
9.Create new RAID 1.

 

[RebateMonger]

Will I get the full amount after I switch both or will it still be 1tera?

It'll still be a 1 Terabyte array. RAID controllers doing redundant RAID only know how to work with "identical" disks. Once the RAID array is created, the extra space on a replaced disk is ignored.

 

[Seero]

I have two 1 tera drives on a pci card in raid1. If I run out of space, can I just remove 1 of the drives and wait till the card tells me its dead then replace and rebuild with a larger drive, then do the same for the other? Will I get the full amount after I switch both or will it still be 1tera?

If that is not correct, how can I upgrade to larger drives? Also, are my drives readable by any sata port or limited to the pci card?

Thanks for any info.

Raid settings don't support dynamic scaling, that is adding a drive on the fly.

Some small explanation on varies raid settings
Explanation of different Raid levels

In layman terms:

raid 0(aka stripe), interconnect multiple drives to form 1 drive.

Size: The size of this setting is the smallest drive x the number of drives. For example, one 30 gb, one 250 gb, and one 1tb in raid 0 means = 90gb.

Speed: Determined by the lowest speed of the array. For HDD, 2 drives is roughly 150%, 3 drives is roughly 175%. For SSD however, it is almost perfect scale, meaning 2 drive is roughly 200%, 3 drives is roughly 300%.

Pros : scalable speed, especially on SSD.

Cons : if one drive dies, all data in the array is lost.


raid 1(aka mirror), write data across multiple drives. This is used to minimize data lost from drives failure. Each drive contains the whole data set and can be used as a independent drive.

Size : The size of the smallest drive.

Speed : The speed of the slowest drive.

Pros : Acts as a fail safe, dynamic backup.

Cons : slow and small. User can't insert a new drive without formatting and reload data onto the drive.


Raid 2,3,4 are obsoleted. They were meant to combine raid 0 and 1 in a meaningful way.

Raid 5: Atleast n drives where n > 2. It acts like a n-1 raid 0, and can reconstruct the entire data set even if a drive dies.

speed and time : same as raid 0 with n-1 drives

Pros : Acts as a fail safe, dynamic backup. Faster and Bigger than raid 1.

Cons : You are screwed if more than 1 bad drive.

Raid 6: Atleast n drives where n > 3. It acts like a n-2 raid 0. Very similar to raid 5.

Pros : Acts as a fail safe, dynamic backup. Faster and Bigger than raid 1.

Cons : Smaller and slower than raid 5. You are screwed if more than 2 bad drives.

----

To answer your question, yes you can, but why start with raid 1 to begin with as you will lose the security once the raid is filled? If data lose doesn't mean life and death, you should go for raid 0. If it is filled, than buy another drive and use it as "D drive" and dump stuff in it while keeping raid 0 fast.

Assuming your motherboard don't support raid 1, it will still be able to read the data off a disk from raid 1, but once you do that, you can't put it back into the raid without formatting it. The same goes to any sata port connection.

Think if a raid as a single disk. To increase the size of raid 1, you will need to identical drives that is bigger than your current raid 1 setup, form another raid 1 with the 2 new drives, then map all data from the old raid into the new raid.