Migrating RAID 6 unit to new hard drives

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2[H]4U
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Jan 14, 2008
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Hi guys, it's been a while since I've been up-to-date on RAID and stuff, but my current RAID 6 is getting a little cramped and port availability is getting limited as well as the drives I'm using.

I'm thinking about migrating my unit to new hard drives, but not invest in any new actual hardware for more ports on my RAID. I currently use a 3U 16-bay rackmount with 13 bays utilized, giving me three bays open for further expansion. The drives I use are Seagate ST31500341AS drives (1.5 TB) and I want to start using 3TB drives to double my usable space whilst maintaining port capacity. I was thinking that I can start with a three-drive RAID5 unit with 3TB (roughly 6TB usable space) and start migrating my data in steps, by reducing the original unit by the storage capacity available when adding new drives, and then shrinking the original RAID in steps until I can finally remove all the old drives without any data loss.

My current RAID controller is a 3ware 9650SE-16ML, would this be the best way to go about upgrading my drives without having to invest in any new hardware to plug in the new hard drives? Thanks.
 
Bump...anyone have any suggestions? Would perhaps a port multiplier do the trick for the time being?
 
As far as I am aware you can't shrink a Unit on that controller, only expand. You may be able to "shrink" it by degrading the array by removing a drive (or 2 in this case), but that would be pretty risky.

From the manual for that series:

Note: You can only migrate a unit to a RAID level that has the same or more
capacity as the existing one.
Click to expand...
 
I also have a 16 port (9650SE-16PML 3ware card), I built a new system and moved the data over the network to a new RAID on a (9750-24i4e).

For > 2 TB, the 9750-24i4e (or 16 port) specifically supports over 2TB, I haven't tested > 2TB on the 9650 series.
 
Do you know if it's possible to shrink partitions or to shrink the RAID slowly one drive at a time as I slowly add 3TB drives to the server and expand those arrays? To me, that would be the easiest way to migrate my data over to the new drives while preserving my data.
 
Don't you have backups ? Or you don't want to rely on only them while reconfiguring the RAID ?
 
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