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Highpoint Rocketraid 3560

D

Draugauth

Limp Gawd
Joined
Mar 29, 2007
Messages
302
Ok so I lost all my data increasing from 2 drives to 4 drives on this. I am sure the mistake was my own.

How do you add drives to an array with this card without having to delete the array and recreate it thus losing all the data even if you select to keep old data?
 
We need quite a bit more info to help. What 2 drives were on the card to start with and how were they configured (JBOD, R0, R1, R5 etc). What 2 additional drives did you add, where on the card did you connect them, how did you try and expand the array, did you try to expand 1 at a time or 2 at once? Did you try and keep them at the same level or did you try and migrate the RAID level at the same time as the capacity expansion?
 
2 Hitachi configured in R0 to xfer data from 2 Samsung in a Win7 Software R0 setup.

I couldn't figure out how to expand the array to be honest.

Hitachi are connected to ports 21 and 22. Samsung are connected to ports 17 and 18.

I could not find an option to expand the array in the Highpoint In-Band Management. Although I'll be honest this is my first foray into hardware raid setups and I am a beginner.

Maint on the array only gives the options to delete, unplug, change cache policy, rename, and change the type of raid array.

I know I fubared the data this time around but I plan on adding in additional drives and changing from r0 to r6 once I get 4 more drives for the system. I just don't want to lose everything again. As is I already lost a lot of data I can't retrieve anytime soon.
 
I know I fubared the data this time around
Click to expand...
Did you click delete?

I could not find an option to expand the array in the Highpoint In-Band Management.
Click to expand...

Raid 0 may not have an option to expand. I would look for that on raid 5/6.
 
I guess in a good news/possible bad news combination, the manual does state that it supports simultaneous raid level AND capacity migrations, but it doesn't specify which raid levels that is for. It is possible it supports 1 or 0 to 10, or 5 to 6 but not 0 to 5 or 6 (or even expanding a R0). I personally don't know the card in question so I can offer substantive help. Here are some suggestions I can make... Since you are planning on adding drives, you might want to add them from port 0 on, it will make identifying drives easier. I know you were going to wait to migrate from R0 to R6, but since you have 4 drives already (as long as they are the same size) you might as well set them up in R6 now. Unfortunately, their manual is woefully inadequate in the case of expanding/migrating arrays, so you might want to email highpoint for specifics in what they do/don't support.
 
Since I had so little data on it I moved it to the OS HDD and went ahead to recreate the raid array and make it a R6.

Something I noticed while looking around is that if you click on the option to change the array that it looks like it can be expanded although not decreased. Going to play with that right now in fact to find out and I'll let you all know.
 
Ok it looks like you can use that option to expand. I created a r0 with 2 of the drives and then kept it at r0 and added in the other 2 drives.

It also appears you can add in drives and change r types at the same time. At least I went from r0 with 2 drives to r6 with 4 drives (although it is still building but it let me do it.)

So now I know in the future. Thank you guys for making me look deeper into it and helping me figure it out. I appreciate it!
 
Generally you can't decrease the size of the array. If you need to decrease the size of a volume (to add an additional volume on the existing raidset for example), you will do that with volume tools in whatever OS you choose to use.
 
Ah ok I didn't know that.

Another question. Will I need to stay with 2TB drives or can I add in 3TB drives as long as they are done in pairs/quads to maintain an equal number or would that require going JBOD? Just thinking of long term ;)
 
Draugauth said:
Ah ok I didn't know that.

Another question. Will I need to stay with 2TB drives or can I add in 3TB drives as long as they are done in pairs/quads to maintain an equal number or would that require going JBOD? Just thinking of long term ;)
Click to expand...

Once you build an array (on just about every HW RAID card), you are bound to the size of the smallest drive in the array. For example, if you build a R6 of 4 2TB drives, if you add a 3TB drive to that particular raidset it will only utilize 2TB of that drive to add to the array. If you decide to add 3TB drives (after your existing array with 2TB drives), create an additional array and populate it with the 3TB drives. If you don't have a minimum of 3 drives (R5) or 4 drives (R6) and you still want to maintain some level uptime redundancy, you can add them in R1 mirrors until you get more drives, move the data off the mirror when you get enough and then move it back to the new array you create.
 
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