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Joe
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 Posted: Thu Nov 20, 2008 8:37 am Post subject: howto easily replace drives |
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I've got a dell 6850 rack mount server w/ three 150Gb hard drives and I
want to replace them with some much bigger drives. It's got a built in
raid 3 controller I think and I've heard that you can hotswap a drive
and it'll replace the data on that drive automatically.
I'm looking for an easy way to replace all three drives w/ bigger ones
other than replace the drives and just re-install the os from ground
up. Maybe somehow easily copy the over.
Anyone have ideas? |
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Aragorn
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| Posted: Thu Nov 20, 2008 6:23 pm Post subject: Re: howto easily replace drives |
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On Thursday 20 November 2008 05:45, someone identifying as *Joe* wrote
in /comp.os.linux.hardware:/
| Quote: | I've got a dell 6850 rack mount server w/ three 150Gb hard drives and I
want to replace them with some much bigger drives. It's got a built in
raid 3 controller I think and I've heard that you can hotswap a drive
and it'll replace the data on that drive automatically.
I'm looking for an easy way to replace all three drives w/ bigger ones
other than replace the drives and just re-install the os from ground
up. Maybe somehow easily copy the over.
Anyone have ideas?
|
The hotplugging should automatically rebuild the array once you place a new
disk in the tray. You can then do this for all three disks, each time
waiting until the array has been rebuilt before you swap out the next one.
The downside of it however is that you will then need to resize your
partitions and the filesystems on them yourself if you want to make use of
the extra space on the new disks. If you're working with logical volume
management, this should be easy. If not, it'll be more work.
All things considered, the quickest and least painful way would be to make
backups of all your data and then replace all three drives at once,
reinitialize the array and install the system from scratch - perhaps with a
more up-to-date distribution - and then restore your data.
Just my two cents... ;-)
--
*Aragorn*
(registered GNU/Linux user #223157) |
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Joe Pfeiffer
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| Posted: Thu Nov 20, 2008 10:26 pm Post subject: Re: howto easily replace drives |
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Joe <NoSpam@SeeScreen.com> writes:
| Quote: | I've got a dell 6850 rack mount server w/ three 150Gb hard drives and
I want to replace them with some much bigger drives. It's got a built
in raid 3 controller I think and I've heard that you can hotswap a
drive and it'll replace the data on that drive automatically.
I'm looking for an easy way to replace all three drives w/ bigger ones
other than replace the drives and just re-install the os from ground
up. Maybe somehow easily copy the over.
Anyone have ideas?
|
RAID 3? I don't remember having seen that actually implemented
before....
Anyway, whatever flavor of RAID you've got you ought to be able to
just replace each drive, wait for it to resync itself, and then go on
to the next drive. Once it's done, resize the partition and
filesystem. Since it's a hardware controller, you shouldn't even need
to do this one at a time. |
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Whoever
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| Posted: Fri Nov 21, 2008 1:03 am Post subject: Re: howto easily replace drives |
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On Wed, 19 Nov 2008, Joe wrote:
| Quote: | I've got a dell 6850 rack mount server w/ three 150Gb hard drives and I want
to replace them with some much bigger drives. It's got a built in raid 3
controller I think and I've heard that you can hotswap a drive and it'll
replace the data on that drive automatically.
I'm looking for an easy way to replace all three drives w/ bigger ones other
than replace the drives and just re-install the os from ground up. Maybe
somehow easily copy the over.
|
Depending on the RAID hardware, you may find that all you can do is
replace the drives (one at a time, allowing the RAID system to re-build
the RAID set) and then create a new (additional) RAID volume in the
unallocated space.
If you were using software RAID, you could expand the RAID volume, then
expand the filesystems in the RAID volume. |
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buck
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| Posted: Fri Nov 21, 2008 3:38 am Post subject: Re: howto easily replace drives |
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On Thu, 20 Nov 2008 11:03:00 -0800, Whoever <nobody@devnull.none>
wrote:
| Quote: |
On Wed, 19 Nov 2008, Joe wrote:
I've got a dell 6850 rack mount server w/ three 150Gb hard drives and I want
to replace them with some much bigger drives. It's got a built in raid 3
controller I think and I've heard that you can hotswap a drive and it'll
replace the data on that drive automatically.
I'm looking for an easy way to replace all three drives w/ bigger ones other
than replace the drives and just re-install the os from ground up. Maybe
somehow easily copy the over.
Depending on the RAID hardware, you may find that all you can do is
replace the drives (one at a time, allowing the RAID system to re-build
the RAID set) and then create a new (additional) RAID volume in the
unallocated space.
If you were using software RAID, you could expand the RAID volume, then
expand the filesystems in the RAID volume.
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Almost certainly NOT.
If you insert a bigger HD into the array, only that portion of it that
is the same size as the other 2 HDs will be used.
If you want to use the entire space, backup, replace all HDs,
let/force the striping to occur and then restore.
--
buck |
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Whoever
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| Posted: Fri Nov 21, 2008 6:10 am Post subject: Re: howto easily replace drives |
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On Thu, 20 Nov 2008, buck wrote:
| Quote: | On Thu, 20 Nov 2008 11:03:00 -0800, Whoever <nobody@devnull.none
wrote:
On Wed, 19 Nov 2008, Joe wrote:
I've got a dell 6850 rack mount server w/ three 150Gb hard drives and I want
to replace them with some much bigger drives. It's got a built in raid 3
controller I think and I've heard that you can hotswap a drive and it'll
replace the data on that drive automatically.
I'm looking for an easy way to replace all three drives w/ bigger ones other
than replace the drives and just re-install the os from ground up. Maybe
somehow easily copy the over.
Depending on the RAID hardware, you may find that all you can do is
replace the drives (one at a time, allowing the RAID system to re-build
the RAID set) and then create a new (additional) RAID volume in the
unallocated space.
If you were using software RAID, you could expand the RAID volume, then
expand the filesystems in the RAID volume.
Almost certainly NOT.
If you insert a bigger HD into the array, only that portion of it that
is the same size as the other 2 HDs will be used.
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Did I say otherwise?
| Quote: |
If you want to use the entire space, backup, replace all HDs,
let/force the striping to occur and then restore.
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It is definitely possible to replace the drives (one at a time) in a
software RAID array, and eventually, when all the partitions that are used
to make the RAID array are the new, larger size, the RAID partiton can be
grown to the new, larger size. Once this is done, the filesystem can be
extended to use the new size of the RAID partiton. I would not do this
without a good backup.
See: http://linux-raid.osdl.org/index.php/Growing |
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