I have an ARECA 1230 controller and setup a RAID5 with four 2TB WD and all is working well. Yesterday I decided to use online expansion and added four more 2TB WD drives for a total of eight drives. I used the raid web console to expand the RAID set and it took about 22 hours. Now I need to modify the volume set since I want to just have one drive to take the entire space (raw 16TBs). When I try to use the web console, it won't work because it keeps saying that I need to confirm the operation even though I have the "confirm the operation" box checked. So I thought I would try to use the BIOS but now I am worried that I might loose my data. Will modfying the volume set cause my data to get wiped? Any ideas why the Raid web console will not work? After modifying the volume set I assume I will need to increase the partition size in windows 7? Can I use Disk Management in W7 or should I use a third party software? Sorry for all the questions but I jus want to make sure I do this right and not loose all my data. Thanks
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RAID 5 Online Expansion
- Thread starter Zagor64
- Start date
Silhouette
Limp Gawd
- Joined
- Dec 14, 2006
- Messages
- 205
You should be able to expand the last/only volume set without losing data. Of course, before doing this you should make sure that you have an updated backup of your data. Regarding the confirmation problem, do you have the latest firmwares and driver for the Areca?
Disk management in Windows 7 should let you extend the partition size. Again, this is a good time to make sure that you have an updated backup of your data.
Disk management in Windows 7 should let you extend the partition size. Again, this is a good time to make sure that you have an updated backup of your data.
Thanks for the info. I was able to use the volume set expansion in the cards BIOS (took an additional four hours). Everything went smoothly. I now have 12.7TB of available space and all my data is still there. Really love this Areca controller. Very fast too.
no reason you shouldn't have been able to expand volume in web console- sounds like maybe you did something wrong. you normally need to manually type in the new size of the volume to fill the extra space after the raid expansion.
it seems a lot of people get tripped up on raid set / volume set terminology, and get confused why a volume set has to be expanded after a raid set expansion- I know I did at first. so think of the raid set like a big physical disk, and the volume sets like virtual physical disks that the raid set can get carved into. the whole point of volume sets is the ability to have multiple "virtual disks" per raid array if you choose.
granted, a lot of people, myself included, only ever use a single volume set that fills up the entire raid set, so the whole volume set notion is kind of redundant in that scenario- but at least the option is there to say carve a Raid1 as a boot volume (C-Drive), and a Raid5 or 6 as a data volume (D-Drive), all within the same set of physical disks.
it seems a lot of people get tripped up on raid set / volume set terminology, and get confused why a volume set has to be expanded after a raid set expansion- I know I did at first. so think of the raid set like a big physical disk, and the volume sets like virtual physical disks that the raid set can get carved into. the whole point of volume sets is the ability to have multiple "virtual disks" per raid array if you choose.
granted, a lot of people, myself included, only ever use a single volume set that fills up the entire raid set, so the whole volume set notion is kind of redundant in that scenario- but at least the option is there to say carve a Raid1 as a boot volume (C-Drive), and a Raid5 or 6 as a data volume (D-Drive), all within the same set of physical disks.
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no reason you shouldn't have been able to expand volume in web console- sounds like maybe you did something wrong. you normally need to manually type in the new size of the volume to fill the extra space after the raid expansion.
it seems a lot of people get tripped up on raid set / volume set terminology, and get confused why a volume set has to be expanded after a raid set expansion- I know I did at first. so think of the raid set like a big physical disk, and the volume sets like virtual physical disks that the raid set can get carved into. the whole point of volume sets is the ability to have multiple "virtual disks" per raid array if you choose.
granted, a lot of people, myself included, only ever use a single volume set that fills up the entire raid set, so the whole volume set notion is kind of redundant in that scenario- but at least the option is there to say carve a Raid1 as a boot volume (C-Drive), and a Raid5 or 6 as a data volume (D-Drive), all within the same set of physical disks.
You are right. I was initially confused by having to also expand the volume set but like you said, it makes sense to allow the use of multiple virtual drives from the same raid set. I just wish they would make it a little more clear in the web console instuctions.
As far as using the web console to expand the volume set I think there might be a bug. There really isn't much to it. Like you said, I typed in the size I wanted (in my case 14000GB) and checked the little box on the bottom of the screen that said "confirm the operation". When I hit the "submit" button, it would just say the "the operation could not continue because I did not confirm the operation". I tried a bunch of times making sure to check the little box confirming the operation but it just kept saying that I did not confirm the operation. Anyway, I was able to do it in the bios so no big deal.