Dell T3500 RAID 1 HDD upgrade confusion

alanains

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Dec 19, 2013
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A little mentoring please.. I am a bit of a newbie to messing in the engine room and buy branded PCs to avoid this chore.

I have a Dell T3500 configured new with two WD 1T hard drives when new, which are getting a bit full.

I went on WD site to see how easy to clone the image of my drives onto large HDD. Seems easy with AcronisWD edition which is free. Well they do say it is simple on the site!!
Bought two 4T drives from DABS - WD Reds for raid.
Now WD are saying that Acronis WD does NOT support Raid and they cannot support me. Lesson there for everyone to see!!

So I buy full Acronis as Acronis say that 2014 wil do what I need. While I am formatting the first drive in a USB caddy, I realise that I dont understand what I am doing.

Do I clone DRIVE 0 (my C drive with operating, programs and data) onto the new 4T drive? I assume so.
BUT what about the second physical 1T drive? Does that need to be cloned onto a SECOND 4T drive? That is what Ii thought when I bought two drives.(Although I could imagine that under Raid 1 it would simply mirror drive 0 anyway)

Reason I ask is that in Computer management - Storage - Disk management, there only shows DRIVE 0 not the mirror.

I know it is physically in the box. and the bootup script fleetingly shows two 1T drives as installed.

Would I expect to see the second drive of the raid? If not, how do I clone it?

Hope this helps everyone as discussing with some pretty bright guys it seems this is an area of mystery.

BTW - Dell are no use at all!! - second lesson for all to see.

Alan
 
Solution
The last is first.

You should realize that RAID1 is a POOR way to do a backup. It really is NOT a backup in many ways. So I agree with you that having two separate 4TB HDD's - one as your C: drive, and one as your backup unit - make much more sense.

The backup unit should be in a separate enclosure - NOT inside your computer. You should connect it when you need to make a backup. After that is done you should disconnect it from your computer and from power and store it in a different place for safety.

A "normal" backup system using good software will have you make a FULL backup from time to time, and in between those times you make an INCREMENTAL backup of only the files that have changed. The incrementals are much smaller and faster...

Paperdoc

Polypheme
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Before you go further, you should read more and understand what RAID means. There are many RAID types, each very different from the rest. From your post I suspect you believe that you have, originally, two 1TB HDD's in a RAID1 array. In that case, although your mobo will correctly tell you that you have two HDD units attached, Windows will see them as ONE "drive" with a capacity of 1 TB, because the mobo is managing the two units as one RAID1 storage resource.

Now, next you want to migrate all your stuff to a new RAID1 array composed of a pair of 4 TB HDD units. The common way to migrate from old HDD to new larger HDD is by cloning. BUT making a clone of a pair of HDD's in a RAID1 array is NOT as simple as making a clone of one stand-alone unit to another. So I'm not surprised that the freebie Acronis True Image WD Edition does not do this for you. But you say that the full Arconis utility will.

Your also should realize that you have a further complication. The common way to organize a stand-alone HDD is limited to a max of 2 TB. To use a 4 TB stand-alone unit fully, you must Partition it using a different system known as GPT. This MAY require a little difference in hardware, and most certainly requires that you use a different version of Windows. The only versions of Windows that allow you to use a HDD over 2TB are the 64-bit versions. I cannot be sure, but I expect that this also applies to RAID1 arrays, just as it does to stand-alone (non-RAID) drives. You should check specifically whether Acronis True Image CAN handle such large HDD units in a RAID array, and what that means for the Windows version you need to have installed.

Because making this clone will involve making a complete copy of everything from TWO HDD's to TWO new HDD's, you cannot expect to do this with a single Destination HDD in an external enclosure! I expect that all four HDD units will have to be mounted and connected to the same mobo. Then somehow the new pair of 4TB units will need to be linked as a new RAID array. That MAY be done for you by Acronis, or maybe you must do some preparation yourself using the RAID management utility in your mobo. You MUST read the manual for Acronis True Imaging to find their instructions for how to clone a RAID1 array!

I will call you attention to something I have found in making clones of a SINGLE drive - not a RAIDn array - to a larger unit. The cloning tools I have used suggest making the destination clone copy the SAME SIZE as the original, leaving Unallocated Space on the new larger HDD unit. But they also ASK you to approve this before proceeding. I always do NOT automatically approve the proposal. I use the menu system to change it to use ALL of the space available on the new Destination Unit to create a larger "drive". I have not done this operation in terms of cloning a RAID array, but watch out for that size thing!
 

alanains

Honorable
Dec 19, 2013
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10,510
Thank you paperdoc.

The T3500 is running Win7 64 bit and just updated BIOS and the Intel Raid so that 4T drives would be OK (I think?).

windows does show only DRIVE0 a reserved partition and a C partition which is 85% full - hence my current need to increase HDD size.

Acronis only talk of creating a BACKUP of the DISC 0 - I presume only one backup?

If I restore this (less than 1T) onto the new 4T dive and expand the C partition, - I am surely almost there? The 4T drive would be in a USB caddy for the Restore I am supposing.

If I remove BOTH 1T drives from the PC, and replace one of them with the new 4T backup will the machine boot from that do you know?

Simply adding the second 4T I assume will tell the Raid controller that the slave drive is out of sync and it will faithfully copy from my first physical drive to the second?

Or is this wishful thinking?


Reading the Acronis literature, I am starting to wonder as to the real benefit of raid 1 anyway - I only need it for security in event of HDD failure, so maybe normal PC architecture with Acronis making a full image backup onto a second 4T dive (but NOT Raid) might be a more understandable and logical solution?

Thanks

Alan



 

Paperdoc

Polypheme
Ambassador
The last is first.

You should realize that RAID1 is a POOR way to do a backup. It really is NOT a backup in many ways. So I agree with you that having two separate 4TB HDD's - one as your C: drive, and one as your backup unit - make much more sense.

The backup unit should be in a separate enclosure - NOT inside your computer. You should connect it when you need to make a backup. After that is done you should disconnect it from your computer and from power and store it in a different place for safety.

A "normal" backup system using good software will have you make a FULL backup from time to time, and in between those times you make an INCREMENTAL backup of only the files that have changed. The incrementals are much smaller and faster, so you can afford to make many of them on one storage medium - like your external 4TB unit. Then you have a history of backups over many times, and you can go back to when you are sure the data are good - that is, before the problem that caused your need to recover.

A weaker but simple backup system can be done with cloning software. The clone is always a FULL backup so it takes lots of time and space. But in making a clone copy you can make its Partition only big enough to hold the data from your Source disk. So, in your case, for the near future your clone copy from the C: drive to the backup unit would be only perhaps 0.8 TB, and you could fit four or five of them on the external unit. Each such clone can be done as a separate Partition created on that external unit. At some point, however, you'll have to delete probably two Partitions to create enough Unallocated Space to allow you to create a new backup that is larger the one of the older Partitions.

Now, if that is the route you choose, getting there has a few stumbling points for which I do not know some answers because I have not worked with HD's over 2TB or with the UEFI BIOS's now in use. The two main points I can't advise on are how to make a clone from and MBT-Partitioned HDD to a GPT-Partitioned one, and how to ensure you can boot from the GPT HDD.

MBT (older) and GPT (new over 2 TB) Partition systems are different and write different information to the start of the HDD. Now, a Clone copy means that the software will copy absolutely everything from the Source unit to the Destination unit, including the details of the Partition Table and the Master Boot Record. I do not know whether the cloning software you plan to use (Acronis True Image WD Edition) can deviate from that and create on your new 4TB unit the proper GPT Partitioning scheme and boot records, based on "translating" the data from the MBT older unit. For that question, you should ask WD's Tech Support staff.

On a similar line, the way your mobo's BIOS boots from a HDD depends on which partitioning scheme it has on the HDD. Your system now will be set, I presume, to boot from an older MBT type of HDD. Somewhere in the BIOS, I hope, there is a place to set it to boot from a GPT-type HDD using the UEFI features of the BIOS. I am presuming that, IF you can make a clone of your old HDD to the new one that includes a proper GPT Partition scheme, you could them set your BIOS to boot from it using the UEFI features. But I am not positive, because I have not done this.

By the way, making a simple clone without any change in Partition scheme will not allow you to use the 4 TB unit as one large 4TB volume. It will limit you to 2TB. I'm not sure whether you could them create a second 2TB volume on the same HDD in the Unallocated Space.

I caution you also on your comments about Expanding a Partition. The tools included in Windows Disk Management will let you Expand a Partition into immediately-adjacent Unallocated Space. But it will NOT do this for the C: drive! That is Windows' way of not risking having something go wrong during the Expansion operation that causes you to lose EVERYTHING on the HDD unit. The much better option, usually, is to use the ability of the cloning software to make the new Partition it is creating on the Destination Drive as large as you want - NOT just duplicate the original Source unit's Partition size - so you do not have to change the size after the clone has been finished.
 
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