Raid

[TronXP]

I have had a hard disk in my raid 5 fail, I eventually managed to source another hard disk exactly the same, which brings me to my question. In your raid, do all of the disks need to be identical, or for example can you have one thats a bigger capacity??

 

The drives in this server are no longer produced and i can't find anyone else who does the same spec. Took me all day yesterday to track down some factory refurbished units.

[Athlona]

I believe the large hard drive will shrink to the smaller size drive, Make doesn't matter they will work, but I'd recommend trying to get the same make... My experience with Raid has been with home setups, so server Raid maybe different not totally sure about them 100% Can anyone else enlighten us???

[jcollings]

Athlona is right - you can put a bigger drive in and it will only use the amount needed.

[PeterW]

http://www.tomshardware.com/2008/03/13/can_heterogeneous_raid_arrays_work/ Have a read of this.

[Geoff]

Ideally you need to use the same make/model/size of drive. However, as long as it has similar performance you can stick any old drive in. Yes, a larger drive will shrink to the size of the other drives.

[TronXP]

I managed to find a drive! And put it in and started to rebuild the raid. Now can I exit the raid setup and boot server up, or do i have to wait for the raid to finish rebuilding?

[Geoff]

You can boot the server up. The raid card will continue to rebuild the array while the machine is running (assuming it isn't done yet). The process is transparent to the OS running on the machine.

[OutToLunch]

If you do go for the same size drive - get the same model... Don't make the same mistake I did which was thinking all 120gb drives would have the same amount of space - bought a replacement drive of a different brand for a RAID setup but it wouldn't accept it - one had something like 117gb free after formatting, the new drive had 116gb. Doh! Ended up with the next sized model up...