Adding Drives to Dell PERC 6/i Virtual Disk

Question

We have a a server with a PERC 6/i controller. There is currently a single virtual disk on that controller, it's a RAID 5 disk with 4 physical drives. We'd like to add 3 drives to the virtual disk and convert it to RAID 6, but aren't sure if we can do that without data loss.

The Dell SAS RAID Storage Manager will allow us to make this change using the reconstruction wizard, but it does not indicate if the reconstruction will be destructive...it does 'strongly reccomend' backing up data.

One additional note, the server boots off a drive that is on this virtual disk if that makes a difference.

Thanks, jon

Answer 1

I don't have direct experience with doing a reconstruction, but three general points to keep in mind when you do anything to the raid subsystem:

1. BACKUP
2. BACKUP the BACKUP
3. Test the backup before you do anything

Personally I am very wary of anything that would change something that low level to your system without any data loss or corruption. But then again people keep telling me I'm way to paranoid sometimes.

Answer 2

Sorry, you can't do it without destroying the existing array.

Everything else in Zypher's post is right on the money: backup twice, restore somewhere once, then proceed.