Upgrading to 15K drives

dholy24

Honorable
Jun 4, 2012
1
0
10,510
My issue is I have 5 5400 speed drives in a Proliant ml350 and was wondering if I can just swap them with 15k speed drives. It is setup with 5 drives in a raid 5. The drives I would be replacing them with are larger than the ones that are in the system. Another issue is the drive that are in the system are SATA and I would be replacing them with SAS.
 
My best guess is that you would have to make an external backup, validate it by comparing it to the RAID data, then build the new empty RAID and restore to it.

The alternative is risky: Remove one drive and degrade the RAID. Install a new 15K drive and let it rebuild. This would be risky because you have no protection during the process and are hosed if the process fails. Unless the system can RAID SATA and SAS drives together, it will not work.

Oh: If you have room for five more drives in the system, just build the new array and copy to it.