XServe RAID Newbie Questions

[taco]

I am an admin. I am more familiar with Mac OS X Server than XServe RAID. XServe RAID looks spooky. My boss set up the RAID and then sort of left server administration in my lap while he goes and does other things.

We’ve ordered a G5 Dual 2.3 XServe. It is coming soon. The XServe RAID we have is the older type – ATA 133 drives. The new XServe will not have enough space to contain our legacy data. So we are hoping we can add an XServe RAID array or two to serve the data. The RAID now has 4×180 drives – the last is a hot spare.

My questions –

1. Can I dynamic ally change an existing XServe RAID array to add additional drives thus making it larger? We have two ATA 133 drive modules (1x250GB and 1×180) from our older XServe that I would like to reuse.

2. Is is possible to take an drive module and mount it all by itself on the XServe RAID?

3. Do all drive modules have to be the same size to create an array?

Please list any gotchas or strategies that I need to know about.

Thanks in advance.

[-mcg-]

I too have the original XServe RAID, so I’ll answer what I can…

1) Yep, you can expand an array. Using the RAID Admin app there is a wizard to walk you through the steps necessary…under the ‘settings’ menu item IIRC.
2) I haven’t tried it, but I don’t see why not. Let us know if it works.
3) I believe that all drives are supposed to be the same size, although it would likely work if you included a larger drive size…you’d likely lose the excess capacity on that drive though, i.e. if you added the 250GB drive to the array of 180GB drives I believe that only 180GB of it would be accessible. I admit that I haven’t tried this on the XServe RAID box, but this is how our other SCSI RAID chassis work.

Make sure you have a current backup of all your XRAID data before trying this…it’s a Murphy’s Law thing, if you have a current backup, you’ll likely never need it…if you don’t, it’s almost gauranteed that something will go wrong!

I hope that helps somewhat…

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