LSI Raid capacity expansion

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Alexandre

New Member
Jul 28, 2018
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Hello everyone,

I need you expertise on LSI 9361-8i raid controller.

I have a 9361-8i with 6x 6TB WD Red drives in raid 6, running under windows 10 Pro.

My question: if I swap drives 1 by 1 (e.g one by quarter) by 10TB drives, will I have the possibility at the end of the operation to expand the total capacity of the existing array ?

Thanks in advance,
Alexandre
 

i386

Well-Known Member
Mar 18, 2016
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It's possible but it's very time consuming and stresses the drives: first your rebuild the array for each drive, and then you do the online expansion.
 

Alexandre

New Member
Jul 28, 2018
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It's possible but it's very time consuming and stresses the drives: first your rebuild the array for each drive, and then you do the online expansion.
Thanks for your answer,

I’m aware it’s gonna take ages but time is on my side ;)

Are you sure my raid card support it ?
(I mean extending capacity after drive replacement with bicger sizes)

Which function should I use ?
Super thanks for your help !!!
 

mobilenvidia

Moderator
Sep 25, 2011
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I added 2x 2TB drives to my 6 Drive RAID6 array just over a month ago and this took 36 hours to expand
The array become very slow but still usable for home stuff
So changing a drive should not take any longer
And this was on a 9285-8e

BUT swapping a 6TB drive with a 10TB will create merry hayhem as the 9361 will most likely only use 6TB of the drive leaving 4TB empty
Then at the end of it all you still only have 6x 6TB drives with 24TB wasted space
All drives need to be identical, I doubt the controller can then expand the drives capacity to then be identical again (6TB to 10TB)
Have you considered 2 more 6TB drives this will be easy to add as I said above
or
Get an expander or 2nd RAID controller (even a cheap 926x) and create a 10TB drive RAID 6 Array then copy the 6TB RAID6 Array over
 

Alexandre

New Member
Jul 28, 2018
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Thanks for your replies.
Buying another LSI card or 2 extra 6TB are not an option to me.
I understand that swapping 6-->10TB then performing an online capacity expansion is feasible, even if needed it will take time.
Thanks for your advices.

Alexandre.
 

vanfawx

Active Member
Jan 4, 2015
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And I'll mention this since no one else has: Make sure you have a backup of this data if you care about it at all. Capacity expansion isn't fail proof. Do you have another copy of this data somewhere?
 

Alexandre

New Member
Jul 28, 2018
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Hello, yes I always have a recent backup that is offline and offsite, thanks for your concern :)
 

kapone

Well-Known Member
May 23, 2015
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My question: if I swap drives 1 by 1 (e.g one by quarter) by 10TB drives, will I have the possibility at the end of the operation to expand the total capacity of the existing array ?

Thanks in advance,
Alexandre
Why not get all 10TB drives at once and restore the data.. might be faster.
You'd even have the 6TB array as a second backup.
I suspect it is due to that?
 

chinesestunna

Active Member
Jan 23, 2015
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Why not get all 10TB drives at once and restore the data.. might be faster.
You'd even have the 6TB array as a second backup.
I agree with this approach as well, if you have a backup copy not on the array then creating a fresh 6x10TB array and dumping data back is probably quickest (unless your offsite/offline is actually cloud in which case nevermind). Another idea, how filled is your 6x6TB array? If it's sub 20TB filled, you can JBOD 2 of the 10TB drives, then create new array with 4 10TB drives and grow array to 6 10TB drives after data has been moved.
I have not done hardware RAID with bigger drive for array expansion, but software driven MDADM in Linux I have successfully moved a 10x2TB to 10x3TB by swapping each disk then growing array and filesystems.
 

Alexandre

New Member
Jul 28, 2018
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3
Hello everyone,

First of all the operation happened successfully.
Here you are the metrics for those who would be interested to perform something similar:

Set a drive offline, replace it by a 10TB and doing a rebuild (6TB drives were 90% full) : 16 hours --> 4 days in total.

I needed to reboot the machine for LSI megaraid manager to allow me to expand the virtual drive.
Once the virtual drive expanded (it took a couple of seconds); an automatic integrity check has been initiated
(the system says it will take 10 days !; I will keep you posted the exact time it will require).

Have a nice day,
Alexandre.
 
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