Putting an additional HDD in a server

[Tricky_Dicky]

I'm rapidly running out of room on one of our servers and as such I was hoping to add an additional Hard Drive in the last available bay. Basically can this be done? It's an NEC R120a with I believe an Intel Raid card.

 

Cheers

Rich

[cromertech]

You'll probably find as I did that it can be done if your raid card will allow it. Mine was an LSI card and was fairly easy to set up this way. Although this is your last bay I wouldn't really add a single drive without some type of redundancy. Would a NAS be a better option?

[Tricky_Dicky]

It's already in a Raid5 setup and is (famous last words) just a stop gap solution before I move some things around and on to the Nas box and new 2008R2 server.

[3s-gtech]

Depends on your RAID card options - some have software which will allow you to expand the array from within Windows, or you can modify the array within the card's BIOS.

[SYNACK]

Find out the exact model/make of the RAID card and look it up online to find out if it allow online or offline expantion of RAID sets in the configuration you have. It should be doable but you will only be able to expand it by the size of one of the existing drives no matter how big the drive you put in is due to the way RAID5 works.

 

It should be doable though, worst case scenario is having to do a full backup, tear down the existing RAID set, build a new RAID set using all the drives including the new one and doing a restore. Obviously if the controller supports expantion it will be much easier.

 

You will then need to either make a new partition with the extra space or expand one of the existing partitions. Assuming you have a data partition that is not a system volume or page file volue you can do this from inside Windows Server from 2003 up with the "diskpart expand" command with no downtime.