[CentOS] upgrading storage on hardware RAID 10 possible?

Fri Aug 13 07:50:16 UTC 2010
Rudi Ahlers <Rudi at SoftDux.com>

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.

-- 
Kind Regards
Rudi Ahlers
SoftDux

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