2010/8/13 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. How about installing new raid 10 on same machine and just migrating data using rsync ? after some rsync cycles, just switching to new raid 10 storage. -- Eero