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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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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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