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I have a Dell R720 with two 136GB drives set up on an existing virtual disc running RAID 1. I've run out of room, purchased two additional 600GB SAS 15K drives I'd like to set up for RAID 1 also to be available to the operating system. How do I go about adding RAIDing and adding these drives?

When I entered the lifecycle controller and tried to add there it had made it sound as if adding the two drives would wipe out any existing drives on the same RAID controller. Is this true?

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  • 2.5K views and not a single up vote. I guess no one found it useful.
    – gh0st
    Nov 9, 2016 at 22:28

3 Answers 3

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For a production server I would NOT risk it. Because I've read the same lines and interpreted it as it would wipe whatever was there and write a completely new raid config, destroying any existing data.

  • Install the Dell Openmanage Server Administrator (OMSA) into whatever OS you are running on that server you can add/edit/delete any arrays you like while the OS is running. Since it's an R720 I assume you have purchased the hot swap hdd capabilities, which would let you insert/remove drives with the system running, and with OMSA edit the raid config to be what you want.
  • If you can't do that, then use the raid card's bios interface. I think it is ctrl+r during POST
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  • It is a production server. I will try these options this evening and report back on my results.
    – gh0st
    Jun 14, 2015 at 23:22
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Yes, it WILL wipe out the configuration.

Do it in Open Manage or the BIOS of the Raid card.

I learned this the hard way and thankfully was able to re-tag them and didn't lose them.

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the only way to wipe the config on the 136gb drives is to delete the array.so don't delete it, you can add drives any time to this server and add them as additional arrays. be sure not to mix different types of drives , they should be all SAS or all SATA, not sure if you can mix 10k and 15k rpm check that. use raid card BIOS to add arrays or Dell server manager in OS. if you want to pull the 136 and just have the 600gb drives back it up first, then swap out the drives. you can keep the 136 drives as is for insurance in case all goes poorly you can pop them back in and import the RAID config.so adding another array will give you new volume 'E' in addition to 'C'. swapping them out will give you 'c' only

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