RAID Array Disk Upgrades

[volve]

I currently have a very nice Aerca ARC-1220 8-port PCIe RAID controller running in RAID5 with 7x 300GB Barracuda drives.

I have been eying the fairly slow prices of the 750GB Barracudas and think it's time for an upgrade.

What has been the experience of everyone here when it comes to replacing drives in an array with larger members? Obviously the easiest would be to back-up the data, dismantle the array and rebuild with the new drives from scratch. However, I'm current in between tape drives and so am at a bit of a loss as how to approach this upgrade without losing any data.

Thoughts?

 

[unhappy_mage]

Backing up and restoring is likely to be your best bet. However, 7 300GB drives in raid 5 have the capacity of only 4 750s in raid 5. Perhaps you could create an OS-based software raid, copy things to it, create a hardware raid 5 with the other disks, and then copy from the software to the hardware raid arrays? It'd take 8 disks, but you could get all your data transferred without buying another controller... Once you were done with the software array, you could expand the hardware array onto the 4 disks from it and have one big 8-disk array.

You'll want to have backups when you do this, though - so perhaps it's just best to wait for another tape drive.

 

[volve]

@unhappy_mage:

Thanks for the suggestions. I'm torn as 8x 750GB drives would be the same price as 4x 750GB + 1x new controller.

But a new tape drive would be double that, probably $2,000 for a decent 400GB unit.

Argh! Decisions decisions!

Thanks again!

 

[Squalish]

Have you considered a 1-week rental of a tape drive or NAS? There's got to be a business niche for this somewhere.

Something like, say, this: http://www.rentit.biz/storage_rental.htm, suggests about $250 for a 3 day rental of a 2TB device.

 

[naro]

dude, hang on a while before you proceed to buy 750gb hdds. 1TB drives are coming out pretty soon and i believe 750gb are going to reduce in price by some amt and even greater since u're going to buy a few.

 

[oplin]

Yeah i would wait a month or so to see what happens with the prices i'm also guessing the 750's are going to take a nice dip once the 1tb are available. Although i didn't hear anything on when Seagate plans on it's 1tb drive, so reductions might be small for Seagates 750 until they release their 1tb drive. I'm hoping the 500's will hit 20cents a gig.