Increasing capacity of RAID1 or

[evasion]

Our MDT deployment server is running out of space, it has a good hardware spec including 32Gb RAM being esxi host before.

Existing RAID 1 has two Fujitsu MBA3147RC 147GB 15k SAS Disks in LSI MegaRaid controller, showing them as virtual drive 1. There are couple of free drive bays to insert more drives but I am not confident in adding drive space that way.

If I was to buy two used drives of the same type (approx £30 on ebay because they are so old) would it be possible to build another array in raid1, using Megaraid storage manager and add as second drive in disk management?

Or what else can be done to increase capacity of existing array?

MDT server is on 2012R2 OS and I have space available on another server, mapped as network drive but applications do not seem to be installing from another network share, or some configuration tweaks are required.

 

Thanks for any useful advice!

[geohanson]

I’ve no experience with that specific RAID controller, however you should be able to add extra disks and create a new RAID volume to use as a secondary data store.

You could then use the existing RAID 1 to hold the 2012R2 OS and the second RAID 1 for holding your images.

 

Its not the most ideal situation (If you were starting from scratch you’d create a RAID10 using all 4 disks) but it should get you some more capacity and should be easy enough to implement. I’d double check the manual for the RAID controller first though just to make sure it is possible.

 

You could also purchase bigger disks, and swap 1 disk, let the array rebuild, then swap the other disk, and let it rebuild again. You should then be able to expand the volume in Windows (I have never tried this and it obviously carries more risk)

 

Alternatively, can you map storage from your other server via iSCSI rather than a mapped drive if you think this is causing the issue?

[strawberry]

147 gb seems large for an mdt server. Don't forget you can host your deployment share anywhere. You could move it to a new drive or even a server easily enough by changing a few variables.

[evasion]

thanks for quick replies. In the meantime I tried deploying application from another network share (correct unc path and permissions) but it just kept hanging. Logs stopped each time at the point when another share was accessed.

as for limited capacity, 147 Gb is actually 136 Gb under raid1 and when partitioned into C: drive for OS and E: drive for deployment share, it will soon run out of space in particular when VS2019 requirement tops 20 Gb alone (teacher insists all components are necessary)!