How can I expand an ICH8R Raid-5 Array?

From Intel: Intel® Matrix Storage Manager
Adding an additional hard drive to a RAID array in order to increase the capacity is known as array expansion. One example of array expansion would be adding a fourth hard drive to a three-drive RAID 5 volume.

The Intel® Matrix Storage Manager does not support array expansion.

Click to expand...

I have a Intel BOXDG965WHMKR motherboard (Intel G965 and the ICH8R ) with currently 3 x 320GB WD SATAII drives in a Raid 5 Array which I was told would allow me to expand. I then added a 4th x 320GB (and later 5th / 6th) physically to the system and unfortunaly THEN found the above statement when I could not work out how to expand the array!

Is there ANY way of increasing my array WITHOUT losing my data / rebuilding the whole array (3rd party tools, hacks etc??? note: I also do not have a spare TB to back it all up to!)

Thanks
Nathan

Not supporting array expansion seems a major limit to me!

I did some searching and did not find anything to help you, so I'm going to go with a No.
You could just use the other drives as standalone drives, or make a second raid.

Hey, not to hijack a thread, but I have a similar question in relation to my own NAS I'm building. Finances are going to be a bit of a problem for me, and I'm not sure I can afford 3x 500gb IDE drives at the moment (if anyone has some to sell/wants to trade please let me know!) for use with my Highpoint 404 IDE RAID card, which I plan to use in RAID5.

I'm planning to use FreeNAS and am wondering if its possible to use the drives individually, say if I purchased one of them alone first, and then to eventually build them into a RAID5 without data loss, provided there's enough room on the disks to support the conversion? I've heard that there are certain cards with support for this sort of thing, but I'm not sure what buzzwords to look for. Is this even possible, or worth the trouble?

Would I be better off just using them as individual storage volumes?

ICH raid doesn't expand, and no third party is likely to make it happen. Should've read the manual more closely.

FreeNAS doesn't support expanding raid 5 volumes. Openfiler does.

There are probably a couple of different ways of getting this done, but they're not safe to try without a full backup. And if you have a full backup, then you have an obvious solution.

Hi Madwand, I may be willing to give these a try as much of my content is backed up to files on DVD (eg Home Videos, Pics, etc) but it took a weekend to load up the OS, transfer files, update content etc last time so any ideas you have are worth a shot!

unhappy_mage said:

ICH raid doesn't expand, and no third party is likely to make it happen. Should've read the manual more closely.

Click to expand...

ICH8r expands arrays. I have gone from a 2-disk R-0 to 3-disk R5. Though it is limited to 4-disk arrays.

drizzt81 said:

ICH8r expands arrays. I have gone from a 2-disk R-0 to 3-disk R5. Though it is limited to 4-disk arrays.

Click to expand...

To quote the Intel Matrix Storage manual (what the heck?! why don't they allow copying?):

In other words, yes, you can expand, but not from a raid 5 to a raid 5. So jmone is SOL, but Xaeos will be able to expand from one disk to raid 5 (once!) or from one disk to several in raid 0 to several more in raid 5. But once you go raid 5 you can't expand any more.

thanks for clearing that up.

Can you go from Raid-5 to "Raid Ready" Raid-0 or Raid-1? Then I could go from this back to Raid-5?
Thanks
Nathan

Not that I can tell from the Intel manual. It appears to be a one-way process.

Highpoint cards allow for expansion, and they're not terribly expensive - around $250 for an 8-port card, half that for a 4-port card, or just under twice that for 16 ports.

jmone said:

Hi Madwand, I may be willing to give these a try as much of my content is backed up to files on DVD (eg Home Videos, Pics, etc) but it took a weekend to load up the OS, transfer files, update content etc last time so any ideas you have are worth a shot!

Click to expand...

As you might have guessed, I'm reluctant to suggest this. I'll post it, but wouldn't recommend it. I'll post it so you can see what might be involved, with the expectation that you'll probably give up on the idea and do something else.

What I would recommend is getting a new big drive, and using that as a partial backup; backup the remaining files somewhere else, and then recreate the array and restore from backups. 500 GB drives have never been cheaper. A backup is a good thing. Even this could be somewhat tricky if your OS is on the same array. So this could also be a good time to get the OS off that array onto a separate small drive. You might also consider holding off until 750 GB drives become cheaper, and in the meanwhile using the new drive as separate storage where absolutely needed.

This has lots of points of failures, and comes with no run-through on my end, warranties, etc. I'd never do it without a full backup or willingness to lose everything. I also assume that the OS is on a separate drive from the RAID array for simplicity.

Read manual to confirm support for 2 x RAID 0 to 4 x RAID 5 migration in your implementation.
Have a drink.
Remove 2 drives of RAID 5. (Or skip to end and get a proper backup!)
Add new drive, and create new 2-drive RAID 0 array using remaining RAID 5 drive (wipe this drive in the process)
Cross fingers.
Attach 2 drives of RAID 5 array again.
Copy all data from degraded 2-drive RAID 5 array to RAID 0 array.
Wait a long long time with fingers crossed.
Check that the copy worked
Have another drink.
Delete RAID 5 array.
Run migration from 2x RAID 0 to 4x RAID 5.
Wait a long long time with fingers crossed.
Profit! (Alternatively, create forum post ranting on the lack of quality or safety of random internet forum posts, and then have arguments about the usage of backups.)

The above is probably wrong, and is likely to fail for a number of reasons, but something like that can be done if you're crazy enough to try it.

I'm thinking - Sod the Intel Raid 5 Array all together! The current plan when I get towards the current array being full is:
1) Buy a single large HDD (500GB or 750GB)
2) Copy all the data (less OS) to the single large HDD
3) Reformat the OS onto on of the HDD
4) Use the rest of the Drives as Dynamic Disks with spaning as one Vol using Windows
5) Copy the data back from the large HDD and keep this one as a backup in another machine using Robocopy to update any changes periodically.

This way I can grow my spanned vol and use different size disks and have a backup on another machine.

Thanks
Nathan

OK, I've purchased another standalone SATA drive and installed it into the PC (Drive F. I also loaded Vista onto the drive and have a dual boot XP (From the Array) and Vista (from F PC. I've copied my data and now want to rebuild the array just using spanning in Windows but how do I:
* turn my Vista F: drive into the new "C:" drive. Do I just trash the array?

Thanks
Nathan

Is there a reason you want it to be the magic letter C:? If not, you could just let it stay F:. It might be problematic to change the drive letter from F: to something else if you already have some installations / configurations that captured that drive letter.

Nope just tradition really. My main concern is what happens when I pull the RAID Drives (containing the XP Install on the System partition) out of the box! Will I be able to boot to the drive containing Vista on a Boot (but not System partition)
Thanks
Nathan