RAID and my Proliant DL 380 G5 'room heater' - theory

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lightman47
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Joined: 2014/05/21 20:16:00
Location: Central New York, USA

RAID and my Proliant DL 380 G5 'room heater' - theory

Post by lightman47 » 2018/10/14 17:14:44

I had one of my (RAID 10) 146GB SAS drives go bad. As I remember, I began seeing an error some where which is how I found out. I ordered a couple new drives but they were 428GB. I switched the bad one and the system rebuilt the array in a matter of minutes and all was well. I was disappointed that it only used 146GB of the new drive. That was a year ago. About a month ago, I decided to replace one of the other (working) drives with the second 428GB I had laying around and as I now expected, the same thing happened.

So, my theory becomes that the RAID 10 array will only use as much space on each drive as is the size of the smallest drive. In other words, if I were to replace the other 6 drives, one at a time, with the bigger 428GB ones, it will resize the entire array to the full size upon the replacement of the last drive.

Is this a correct assumption, or will I have to 'ditch' the entire array and start over if I were to replace them all? I am'nt sure I will; this is more a knowledge question.

In either case it's no catastrophe as this machine does pretty much nothing but to run BOINC/SETI packets during it's 8 hour per week run (in the winter). It was a Christmas present from my son years ago - so that I could play with it and learn running a headless/remote Linux machine from the SSH command line.

Thank you.
:)

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TrevorH
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Re: RAID and my Proliant DL 380 G5 'room heater' - theory

Post by TrevorH » 2018/10/14 21:16:51

Nearly right. Almost certainly it won't auto-resize once all the drives are the same larger size but you'll be able to kick off a resize operation and then it will do it. Quite "how" is controller specific and utility specific (HP controllers have BIOSes and iLO interfaces and several different command line clients).
The future appears to be RHEL or Debian. I think I'm going Debian.
Info for USB installs on http://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/InstallFromUSBkey
CentOS 5 and 6 are deadest, do not use them.
Use the FAQ Luke

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