From: John Gormley (JGormley@scu.edu.au)
Date: Sun Nov 03 2002 - 16:41:22 EST
Thanks as always for the quick replies.
Respondents were:
Bryan Lavelle
Greg Rudd
Jim Kurtenbach
Chris Ruhnke
Mandell Degerness
The answer was a fairly resounding NO. The raidset will have to be rebuilt
if the new disk is to be incorporated into the raidset, unless as a hot
spare or as a standalone disk.
Individual answers follow the question.
Original Question:
I have an RA3000 attached to an Alphaserver 1200 running vers 4.0G. I have
configured 6 of the disks in the array into a one virtual disk raid 5 set.
The 7th disk was not available for unknown reasons (later determined to be a
disk error that was undetected by the HSZ22 or the lights on the front of
the disk????), but has since been replaced and is now available.
Is it possible to add this disk into the raid set without disturbing the
existing data and requiring a restore/rebuild of all data? This may be a
simple question, but I can't get my head around it. I am using Storage Works
Command Console and can now see the disk, but can only find info in the
manuals for creating/deleting virtual disks and adding devices online, but
not anything on adding a device to an existing virtual disk.
Any help would be appreciated, as always I will summarise.
Answers
Bryan Lavelle:
This is not possible. If you want to add the extra space, the entire raid
set must be removed and reconstructed, then the data restored from tape or
whatever.
Greg Rudd:
The only way I know that you can get around this problem is to add the disk
as
a hot-spare. The only other way is to blow the raid-set away and start
again
as parities are writen to each disk in the raid set.
Jim Kurtenbach:
If the raidset shows normal, then no you can't add a disk to it. If it
shows degraded or reduced, then you can: ADD SPARE DISK10000. Then it will
pick it up and add it to the array.
Chris Ruhnke:
Short answer: No way!
Mandell Degerness:
You really only have three options:
1) Re-create the RAID set using all of the disks and restore the data from
backup.
2) Use the 7th disk as a hot spare in case of failure of one of the disks in
the RAID
3) Use the 7th disk by itself
Regards, John
John Gormley
Senior Unix Systems Administrator
Southern Cross University
LISMORE NSW
AUSTRALIA
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