Can I replace drives in RAID 1 with bigger drives?-Vista

[71michaels]

I have a pair of Raptors (150) running in raid 1 on a ICH8R (Asus P5B Deluxe - P965) board. I don't have enough space and I was wondering if I could pull one drive and replace it with a 320 gig drive, then let the controller rebuild the new drive, then pull the other 150 and replace it with another 320. Then once the mirroring completes I would want to expand the volumes for my two Vista installs (I have a 64 bit and 32 bit Vista dual boot).

Can I do this without going down the reinstall route?

Thanks in advance.


Intel Core 2 Duo E4300@2700 MHz (9 x 300)
Asus P5B Deluxe

 

[Onus]

Probably.
1. Replace one drive with a 320 and rebuild the RAID.
2. Break the RAID. Use only the new 320. Use Partition Magic (or similar) to expand the partition to full size.
3. Add a second 320. Rebuild the RAID.

I would think this ought to work. You may get warnings about drive size when you rebuild the RAID on mismatched drives, but it should work.

 

[Julian33]

I actually accidentally broke my RAID1 array the other day by plugging a drive back into the wrong SATA port. The great thing with RAID1 is that if the array is broken, you can still access the contents of the drives, so I ended up seeing two drives in XP, containing exactly the same data!

I think the above solution should work, but if it dosn't you could always remove one drive, add another two drives in RAID1, copy the HD image from your original RAID array, then finally remove the original remaining drive.

 

[Greg_Clark]

I was wondering.. Is this possible to do with a RAID 5 or a RAID 6 too?

 

[chookman]

should be the same with RAID5 or 6, although resizing the drive would be a problem.

I dont think you would be able to increase partition size as easily.

 

[zenmaster]

This would not work in RAID5 unless the Raid controller was specifically designed to handle the job to take care of this. Most high-end server raid controllers have this, but I doubt any on-board ones do.

 

[jt001]

I don't think anyone would be dumb enough to use RAID 5 on an onboard controller...