Hi all,
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, and when a client needed an upgrade like this we had to build a new server with the same spec and larger hard drives and then migrate the data across, which can sometimes take a few days to complete (due to DNS & MAC address caches).
So, I'm wondering, is it possible (and safe) to upgrade the existing drives to larger drives in a running server?
I know we're done this with Linux's software RAID many times with great success. But I don't want to take a risk if it's not possible. The amount of effort and upfront costs for a new server makes hardware RAID far more expensive than it's reliability, which Linux's software RAID offers equally so I'm beginning to think we should just move all the servers to software RAID in the future as well.