Remove drives from RAID10 on Dell r420? (or backup/restore)

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davidv

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Aug 2, 2022
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I wasn't quite sure where to post this, but I received a Dell r420 the other day and stupidly configured the 4 x 300GB SAS drives in the front as a single 600GB RAID10 array.

This reduces my options for replacing drives and I was thinking of putting an SSD into one of the drive bays.

The RAID adapter is a Dell PERC 710 mini.

I've tried taking a drive offline, but the only options from there are to bring it back online or rebuild. I can't seem to remove it from the RAID10 array.

I've already spent some time installing things and I don't want to have to backtrack and do it all again, so if I can't remove drives from the RAID10, it seems by only other option would be to do a back/restore.

What would be the best method to do a backup/restore?
There's currently 80GB used on the drive.
I haven't had to do a backup/restore for a long time so I don't even know what tools to use. Should I be booting from a USB and imaging the virtual drive?
 
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mobilenvidia

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Sep 25, 2011
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RAID 10 need 4 drives minimum and grows in lots of 4 drives from there (ie 4,8,12etc)
RAID5 can start with 3x drives giving you 600GB total space and if a drives fails replace it and array will rebuild, 2 drives fail you are buggered
 

davidv

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Aug 2, 2022
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RAID 10 need 4 drives minimum and grows in lots of 4 drives from there (ie 4,8,12etc)
RAID5 can start with 3x drives giving you 600GB total space and if a drives fails replace it and array will rebuild, 2 drives fail you are buggered
Ahh of course... mirroring then striping.. so needs 4.
I haven't actually used RAID10 before, I've been living with the luxury of Synology Hybrid RAID for so long. I'd be happy to convert it to just mirroring, but I'm guessing the card won't do that.
 

mobilenvidia

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Sep 25, 2011
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The H710 will do RAID 0, 1, 5, 6, 10, 50 and 60
But you're better off with RAID 1 if limited with drive bays
You will only have 300GB of usable space

RAID 10 can be faster than RAID5 but uses a lot of drives and 50% space wasted, vs one drive in RAID 5, 2 drives in RAID 6
 

mobilenvidia

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Sep 25, 2011
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Ah yes, my bad, you can add a 2 drive RAID 1 to each RAID0, always thought wrongly of needing to add Dual RAID1's to the RAID0, probably thinking of RAID100
But honestly never used RAID 10, always stuck with RAID5 in early days and RAID6 in latter, did give RAID60 ago before wife and kids but wee bit over kill
 
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