I currently have an 8 SAS drive array running on a 2port card that doesn't support IT Mode flashing, so I am still using HW RAID unfortunately, in Windows at that....
My question is: Will I lose the array and all data by connecting an Expander in between the RAID card and the current drives/array ?
How transparent is the Expander and will it force me to reconstruct the array and put the data at risk ?
I realize that this might seem like asking a Win98se question on a Win10 Forum, so I apologize.
The LSI card has suited me well over the years and I don't really have a reason to replace it, other than to expand things a bit.
As an aside, I did try and simply add a second identical RAID card (matching model, firmware etc, as I have a few) and a secondary array into the machine, but am now facing resource conflicts, most notably Network connectivity throughput issues when feeding the file server, so a 2nd card has already been tried and is currently failing fantastically, which leads me to believe that it's a PCIe resource problem, so an expander seems easy if I can save the current array and simply add more drives for the future.
Lastly, as my primary array runs SAS2 drives, I would like to add a secondary array onto the expander using cheaper SATA3 NAS drives if possible. Not mixing drives within arrays, but keeping the same type of drive within each array. Is this possible ?
thanks in advance,
Allan
My question is: Will I lose the array and all data by connecting an Expander in between the RAID card and the current drives/array ?
How transparent is the Expander and will it force me to reconstruct the array and put the data at risk ?
I realize that this might seem like asking a Win98se question on a Win10 Forum, so I apologize.
The LSI card has suited me well over the years and I don't really have a reason to replace it, other than to expand things a bit.
As an aside, I did try and simply add a second identical RAID card (matching model, firmware etc, as I have a few) and a secondary array into the machine, but am now facing resource conflicts, most notably Network connectivity throughput issues when feeding the file server, so a 2nd card has already been tried and is currently failing fantastically, which leads me to believe that it's a PCIe resource problem, so an expander seems easy if I can save the current array and simply add more drives for the future.
Lastly, as my primary array runs SAS2 drives, I would like to add a secondary array onto the expander using cheaper SATA3 NAS drives if possible. Not mixing drives within arrays, but keeping the same type of drive within each array. Is this possible ?
thanks in advance,
Allan
