Summary - Adding Hard drive to Raid 5

From: Ron Bramblett <bramblett_at_fullerbrush.com>
Date: Wed, 12 Jan 2000 16:00:27 +0000

This is a summary of what I have gotten so far.
Many thanks to the people who have answered.
alan_at_nabeth.cxo.dec.com
Johh P Speno
Chuck Taylor
Peter Reynolds
Bryan Lavelle

This is my original question -
I have a question about adding a new hard drive to my existing raid 5, 4 disk set. I am running Tru64 Unix 4.0e. I have a raid-5 4 drive set already installed. These drives are 4.3GB each. We currently have one open slot for a hard-drive and have a KZPSC-BA model PCI backplane RAID 3 channel
controller. All of my current SCSI ID's on one channel are already taken. How do I go about adding a new hard-drive? Can I add a new drive to an existing RAID 5 and not have to reload the existing data onto the the complete set??

I got overwelming response that I will have to backup the current data set then add a new drive to the Raid-5 set and initialize the set with the new drive then restore the data. I have been talking to vendors and have also come up with the idea that it will take a long time to initialize the drive. One of them said that I can change the write through to write back during initializing only. Then change it back to write through. This will reduce the initialization time required. As I have been researching this subject I have found the start-up disk and the specific manual for setting up and configurating the particular RAID array controller that we have.

I haven't done the work yet but will do so next month. It should be fun
Thanks for all of your help.
 
 

--

Ron Bramblett                   | Men never do evil so completely & cheerfully
Systems Administrator           | as when they do it with religious conviction.
The Fuller Brush Company        |                               - Blaise Pascal

  Received on Wed Jan 12 2000 - 16:03:04 NZDT