From: Rudi Ahlers Rudi@SoftDux.com
Can anyone please tell me, from experience, if it's possible to upgrade the hard drives in a RAID 10 system from 250GB HDD's to 500GB / 750GB HDD's, while the server is running? The server runs CentOS 5.5 x64. Our hardware vendors simply always say no, so we never actually tried doing this. So, I'm wondering, is it possible (and safe) to upgrade the existing drives to larger drives in a running server?
When you said "we never actually tried"... tried what exactly? It depends... on your RAID ctrl of course... By example, with HP SmartArrays, you should be able to unplug a disk, plug a bigger one and let it rebuild. Rinse and repeat for all the disks. Then, you can expand the array... Although I did not try it so far.
JD