Expanding RAID 5: 3 hdd - 4hdd

Hi all, my Cloud EX4 have 3 hdd. I want to expand the RAID 5 volume with one more hdd. Can i do it without losing data? thanks

Further to @foschi's question, I've already added a 4th drive to a 3 drive RAID 5 setup about 3 days ago. I'm not sure if it worked or not because the system has been busy ever since. The EX4 LCD screen says "SYSTEM BUSY, PLEASE WAIT". The EX4 web interface says, "The system is busy. Please wait until the system LED turns solid blue before inserting another drive." This is in a pop-up window which doesn't allow me to close it or minimize it. I don't have access to the EX4 home tab, users tab, etc. Worse is that I can't tell if it's adding the fourth drive to the existing array or if it's hung as there are no other messages. Each drive has a solid blue LED lit up, but the system LED is a blinking blue. My question is how long should I wait for the system to be ready? It's already been three days! What would happen if I physically shut down the system using the power button or pulled the plug?

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(RAID) super geek HDD questions

I want super geeks to respond because I trust their opinions :P and I know nothing about RAID or external HDDs now adays.
I'm a video/3D animation professional and my internal HDD is clogged with crap from old clients. In turn it's not allowing me to have much fun.
I found an eSata pci-E 2-port card for about 50 bux. I've been looking at a lot of RAID HDDs that are eSata on NewEgg but a lot of them say "PC Ready." The only one I see that is "Mac Ready" is not eSata and does not give me the rpms (5100 7200). Ideally I'm looking at 1TB-1.5 TB. Does it matter that some of them say "PC Ready". One of them I saw was "FAT 32". Isn't that what Mac is?
Is RAID hard to set up? Do I really need it with eSata Speeds being up to 3gb per second? Is there a solution that is around the same as regular eSATA drives described below?
What are your suggestions and where can I find them cheapest? I'm kinda thinking I don't need RAID and this is what I've found below.
This is the cheapest eSATA raid I've found:
http://www.micronet.com/products/sr4.htm
These are the drives I've looked at so far and wonder if they are good for Mac but are not RAID:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822204079
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822154332
http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=35721 42&CatId=136
Thank you
Scott
Message was edited by: spiralof5

Maybe it would help you to become more knowledgeable about RAIDs so you can make a more intelligent decision. OS X does support software RAIDs and Disk Utility can be used to make RAID arrays from multiple drives installed in the computer. You can also purchase hardware RAID cards to use with internal or external drives. You can purchase RAID systems that can connect to the FireWire ports. Many options. FireWire systems will be slower than RAIDs using dedicated hard drives internally or connected directly to a SATA controller.
RAID Basics
For basic definitions and discussion of what a RAID is and the different types of RAIDs see RAIDs. Additional discussions plus advantages and disadvantages of RAIDs and different RAID arrays see:
RAID Tutorial;
RAID Array and Server: Hardware and Service Comparison>.
Hardware or Software RAID?
RAID Hardware Vs RAID Software - What is your best option?
RAID is a method of combining multiple disk drives into a single entity in order to improve the overall performance and reliability of your system. The different options for combining the disks are referred to as RAID levels. There are several different levels of RAID available depending on the needs of your system. One of the options available to you is whether you should use a Hardware RAID solution or a Software RAID solution.
RAID Hardware is always a disk controller to which you can cable up the disk drives. RAID Software is a set of kernel modules coupled together with management utilities that implement RAID in Software and require no additional hardware.
Pros and cons
Software RAID is more flexible than Hardware RAID. Software RAID is also considerably less expensive. On the other hand, a Software RAID system requires more CPU cycles and power to run well than a comparable Hardware RAID System. Also, because Software RAID operates on a partition by partition basis where a number of individual disk partitions are grouped together as opposed to Hardware RAID systems which generally group together entire disk drives, Software RAID tends be slightly more complicated to run. This is because it has more available configurations and options. An added benefit to the slightly more expensive Hardware RAID solution is that many Hardware RAID systems incorporate features that are specialized for optimizing the performance of your system.
For more detailed information on the differences between Software RAID and Hardware RAID you may want to read: Hardware RAID vs. Software RAID: Which Implementation is Best for my Application?

Expanding Raid 5 array (with windows 2003)

I recently put 2 more 500GB drives into my existing 4 drive Raid 5 setup. I went through the expansion through RAID ADMIN 1.5. It synced the array which took about a day and inside the RAID ADMIN 1.5 tool it says the array is now 2.27 TB.
Inside windows 2003, the size of the drive still says 1.36 TB. I've restarted the windows server, and restart the x-serve RAID. Still it wont update the size of the drive.
I have read some PDFs from apple that expanding is a 2 stage process, doing the expansion followed by merging the slices together afterwards. When i goto the merge slicing tool, it says the array has 1 slice, but underneath it there is a checkbox that says "I understand that slicing an array or merging slices will cause data on the array to be lost"
I'm not sure if thats what i need to do, i'm worried that im going to loose all my data on the drive by just wanting to expand it. If you have any information that can help that would be appreciated. Thank you!

I recently put 2 more 500GB drives into my existing 4
drive Raid 5 setup. I went through the expansion
through RAID ADMIN 1.5. It synced the array which
took about a day and inside the RAID ADMIN 1.5 tool
it says the array is now 2.27 TB.
Inside windows 2003, the size of the drive still says
1.36 TB. I've restarted the windows server, and
restart the x-serve RAID. Still it wont update the
size of the drive.
Windows 2003 can extend the disk using disk administrator on file system/volume level. I have tried it and it worked just fine.
http://www.windowsitpro.com/Article/ArticleID/48992/48992.html
Would I not backup my data before doing this? NO WAY. Always backup your data before you do any volume expansion or re-layout.
Would this work every time? I do not know if Apple test Xserve RAID for ALL Xserve RAID features such as LUN expansion or LUN masking, etc. It's certified though.
I have read some PDFs from apple that expanding is a
2 stage process, doing the expansion followed by
merging the slices together afterwards. When i goto
the merge slicing tool, it says the array has 1
slice, but underneath it there is a checkbox that
says "I understand that slicing an array or merging
slices will cause data on the array to be lost"
I'm not sure if thats what i need to do, i'm worried
that im going to loose all my data on the drive by
just wanting to expand it. If you have any
information that can help that would be appreciated.
Thank you!

Expanded Raid Size Not Showing Up In Windows Explorer

Hello,
Using Server 2012R2. I had a 32TB RAID 6 array and added more disks. I used MegaRAID Storage Manager to 'expand' the logical disk to70TB. The expansion/initializing is complete, according to MegaRAID. However, when looking in windows explorer, the volume
is still 32TB.
In the 'Server Manager -> File and Storage Services -> Volumes' it says the volume is still 32TB with some free space.
In the 'Server Manager ->File and Storage Services -> Volumes - > Disks' it says volume capacity is 70TB and 38 is 'Unallocated'
Is the volume really still 32TB after waiting 8 days for MegaRAID to expand the array or is windows explorer just not refreshing the information? Or, is there something else I must do?
Any help is appreciated.

When I try to do this, I get the error...
"the volume cannot be extended because the number of clusters will exceed the maximum number of clusters supported by the file system"
I searched around for that error and found that 4k size clusters won't allow volumes over 16TB.
http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/6780cae6-90f2-4f16-b4d2-c975e1d2eb63/error-the-volume-cannot-be-extended-16tb-volume?forum=dataprotectionmanager
I entered those commands and here were the results for that volume.
C:\>fsutil fsinfo ntfsinfo M:
NTFS Volume Serial Number :       0x3262d94b62d91487
NTFS Version   :                  3.1
LFS Version    :                  2.0
Number Sectors :                  0x000000105efbefff
Total Clusters :                  0x0000000082f7df7f
Free Clusters :                  0x0000000011996df1
Total Reserved :                  0x0000000000000600
Bytes Per Sector :               512
Bytes Per Physical Sector :       512
Bytes Per Cluster :               16384
Bytes Per FileRecord Segment    : 1024
Clusters Per FileRecord Segment : 0
Mft Valid Data Length :           0x0000000015840000
Mft Start Lcn :                  0x0000000000030000
Mft2 Start Lcn :                  0x0000000000000001
Mft Zone Start :                  0x00000000139d6460
Mft Zone End   :                  0x00000000139d9660
Resource Manager Identifier :     ACC105BE-A72B-11E3-80B5-00219B9AABFF
EDIT: Also note that in MegaRAID the volume is displayed as having 64KB clusters.

RAID BIOS sees HDD but XP does not

I have a K7T266Pro2-RU (MSI 6380) mobo with an 80 GB Maxtor HDD on IDE3 and a 250 GB WD on IDE4, using the latest FastTrak100 RAID drivers from the promise website. On IDE 1 and 2 I have 3 optical drives installed.
The problem is that while the RAID bios detects the HDD's just fine (as two separate Stripe 1+0 arrays) and boots fine off IDE3, XP does not see the other array and therefore the larger HDD is invisible. Of course I have SP1 installed with the LBA support, and when I try the HDD on one of the primary IDE channels it is recognised just fine by XP.
So one might think that the problem lies with the RAID driver.....except to throw another spanner in the works, I did have this working fine on the RAID controller, until I decided to re-install XP from scratch on the smaller HDD (larger HDD is full of data). But for some reason this fresh install will not recognise the second HDD on the RAID controller... whats killing me is that it did work beforehand, and now it wont. I cant think what I have missed to make this work....
Any ideas appreciated please

You really had it working before? Weird - it's not supposed to work! The Promise controller supports either 0 or 1. I can't see how you got 0+1.
And how can the second (bigger) HDD be the "other array" if you've got mirroring in there somewhere? OK, you can maybe fool a single drive into thinking it's a striped array but no way a mirror is anything other than a second drive which is part of the SAME array as the first drive.
It looks like you have successfully created a mirrored array using the 2 drives (RAID 1). There's no way you have a striped array accross the 2 drives since they have to be the same size for that to work. Mirroring is OK with drives of different sizes. The trouble is, the extra space on the larger drive is just wasted - the total array space is limited to the size of the smaller drive.
Since the second drive is just a mirror and the extra space is always unusable, it's no surprise you can't see it in XP. You would never want to read or write specifically to the mirror.

Reccomended RAID array 0 hdd disks

What hdd would you reccomend to set up a raid array (RAID 0) on MSI K8 Neo? Preferably Maxtor, Seagate or Hitachi. Any problems (like max capacity, etc.) while setting up this array?

Quote
Originally posted by D_o_S
Why wouldn't you "trust" RAID 0? I want to boost performance rather than security (don't need extra backups). Why is the onboard Promise controller "bad"? I think it looks like a quite good solution (double bandwith).
First, everyone needs backups unless they dont need their data (see note about "rm -Rf /" later).
Second, IMHO on board RAID solutions (which are all software raid to date) are just gimmicks, pointless chrome, feeping creatureitis; in bygone days added to convince gullible users that product A was actually better than product B rather than just product B with extra IDE connectors whacked on it. They are an approximation of a serious tool, like any serious tool it is dangerous in the hands of amateurs; doubly so when the tool is a low budget immitation of the real thing. I have invested many hours dealing with the results of software raid in businesses where some code-mokey thought they had a clue and decided to make the server perform "better"; likewise rebuilding (without RAID) the dead machines of friends who thought it made their home PC faster, in most cases they found it faster without RAID-0...
which leads to...
I dont see the obsession with RAID 0 (likewise I dont understand why people rampantly benchmark their home machine, does it play at 1280x1024 and 60fps?? then its fast enough), it just doesnt offer any benefit or improvement in real performance for the vast majority of users (I *DO* use hardware ultra wide scsi Raid0+1 on my serious box, so I have some frame of reference here)... sustained data transfer rates from a RAID-0 with 10k rpm ultra wide scsi drives are negligibly faster than that from an individual drive of the same type. Sure, interleaving and cascading caches do allow for more prompt access of tables and regularly used small files which helps databasing and sci apps but little else, furthermore tcq and prefetch are rapidly eating into these advantages with modern drives. Frankly, Id rather have the 8~12% of the CPU used by the on-board raid controller to do the raid work for flinging rectangles around (assuming you play games). To each their own, however, if you want to do it, do so.
Third, I dont "trust" any solution which has only unrecoverable failure modes (not so true with advanced hardware raid controllers, but completely true from software raid.), take this on top of the "dont see why" rant above. If you use a software raid controller, such as that on the k8t neo, you are at the mercy of the stability of your entire system, not just the drives and their controller. If your CPU/ram combination is flakey, if you overclock (likely if you are so performance obsessed as to want low budget raid-0 to begin with); then the chance of a catastrophic data loss is very high; ANY fandango-on-core experience can FUBAR a software Raid-0.
It gets down to this, how much attachment do you have to the data on your system? could you "rm -Rf /" (insert appropriate windows equivalent) without flinching? if you could, then go ahead, but expect to have total data loss on a better than annual basis. SOFTWARE RAID of any kind is grade A stupid IMHO; HARDWARE Raid-0 (without a -1) is only marginally less so. RAID is a great tool when properly implemented on a hardware controller, but a tool which offers no benefit to the majority of desktop systems.
well, I think my opinion on the topic is clear now.
err!
jak.

Raid 1 on HDD got removed

HI,
I've got 4 HDDs with raid 1 setup on two of the HDDs, my system running on-windows server 2008 r2 Enterprise , crashed a few days ago but i was able to restore my system back. But now the HDD that i got the RAID setup on is shown as unallocated
space on the disk management tool and also got the disk as missing.
System OS is on the hard disk without the raid and moreover i cant acces the HDD with the raid on from the explorer.
So what should i do to make my HDD with raid usable as i cant loose the files on them.

Hi
Perhaps you should backup those files, trash the raid and build a new Raid 5 setup, it will give you more redundancy.
Hope this helps. Please remember to click “Mark as Answer” on the post that helps you, and to click “Unmark as Answer” if a marked post does not actually answer your question. This can be beneficial to other community members reading the thread.

MacPro (early2008) with RAID Card - Other HDD's not seen?

Hello
I have a MACPRO (early 2008) with an first gen apple RAID card installed.
the RAID is set to mirror.
The HDD for the RAID are SAS seagate cheetah x2, these are in bays 1 and 2.
In Bays 3 and 4 I have other HDD's, and Would like one to be a SPARE and the other to be TIME MACHINE Backup.
Trouble is the HDD's in Bays 3 and 4 do NOT show up on either Desktop OR in DISK UTILITY.
Why is this?
and how do i go about in getting these HDD's in BAYS 3 and 4 to show up and carry out the TASKs I would like to set them up for?

Mixing SAS and SATA are in there now controlled by the RAID card?

K7N2G-ILSR and Raid with ATA HDD

Hi,
I was wondering if its possible to use two WD 80 GB ATA hdd's in raid on this mobo. I have one WD800JB and I wanna buy another one to use in Raid 0. Note..these are no SATA hdd's...
Do you guys have some info on installing these hdd's in raid...how's it done?
I hope you can help me.
grtz.

only if you also buy sata adaptors really as well
ide 3 supports a single drive only

Using Raid 5 with HDD-8265 and windows 7 32-bit

Hi
I'm using a PXIe-1075 chassis with a NI-8262 to control a HDD-8265 which has a Areca ARC-1231ML controller. On the host computer a Windows 7 Professional 32-bit system is running. The HDD-8265 is recognized and I could install the latest driver. I also could generate a Volume Set on the Raid using Raid 5 level by using the ArcHTTPGUI Browser.
The problem, which I'm facing now is that I cannot see the "unallocated disk" in the "Disk Management" of Windows. If I use Raid 0, there is no problem. Do I need to install any additional drivers for the Raid 5 in Windows 7?
Thanks

Here is the link for palm desktop 4.1.4
http://kb.palm.com/wps/portal/kb/common/article/37014_en.html

Different RAID card and HDDs

Hello -
I did some searches for older posts, but didn't find anything with a definite answer.
I know the Apple RAID FAQ mentions that only Apple drives are supported with the RAID card both some posts have said this is not the case anymore. And there are several posts with people buying new WDs and Seagates for their Pros. So does the Apple RAID card support other drives?
My next question is does the Pro support any other RAID card beside the Apple one? If so, are there any recommendations on a good one? Will it work fine with the Pro form factor and with OS X?
Thank you

Search through http://www.amug.com which reviews most every controller and hard drive, as does http://www.barefeats.com
RAID is a frequent topic, search for userid "mbean" and "RAID" and you'll come across some very in-depth replies.
What do you need your setup for though is the first question. And whether $799 is the best bet, first.

MSI GT60 Windows 8 - SSD Raid is detected as HDD (Optimize)

So I just got the GT60 and I have my OS installed on my Super Raid 128GB setup. The problem I have is that when I went to the "optimize" option of Windows 8, I saw that it detected my SSD Super Raid Setup as HDD and not SSD. I thought analyzing the drive might fix it, but it didn't. Now I'm afraid to optimize it for fear that it will defrag it instead of TRIM.
Edit: Somehow after 2 days of not checking on it, it somehow fixed itself... I don't know how it did it, but I didn't do anything to it other than some Windows updates and app crash fixes. I guess that fixed it...
Well as a side question, should I optimize the other 2 drives that I see?
BIOS_RVY
WinRe Tools
Should I run optimization on them?

Original devices? What devices?
My stripe size is 128kb.
I have used other benchmarks. Unfortunately mark the same results.
I have also looked at the firmware of the SSD are updated. I tried one without ssd raid, and I get 200mb result of reading and writing 90MB.
Something is wrong, why results so low?
PS: Seen this way, the raid is making me x2 speed, but why the low result?

Re: Qosmio G30 - RAID Problems on OS Installation

I've had my Qosmio G30-161 for half a year, and thought it'd ought to be time to reinstall the whole thing, so i could get rid of stuff i didn't need (Programs, Viruses and non-interesting video clips).
So i took my XP MCE Cd and tried to install, and i got guided through and come to the place where i needed to choose between 1st Unknown, 2nd Stripping, and 3rd Mirroring. I choose the stripping as i wished my harddrives to be in one. Then when i pressed "next" it gave me the error message "1005 - HDD not ready?"
I've tried going into the BIOS and chaneg the setting to different settings that Toshiba told me to, but it also warned me that if i changed the settings my OS would have to be reinstalled. No problem there. But i still get the same error message "HDD not ready?". So now i have to use another computer than my own to check the forums and mail etc.
Anyone know what i should do? I'll be glad with anything as long as i can have both my harddrives (60GB+60GB), and a working OS. :)
Please help, I'm urging for it, since the computer is the one i use for my school work. Feel free to ask questions about system stuff. If you have an answer, please let it be simple, since i realy don't wanna mess up again ^_^

Please check the details in user manual about the RAID installation.
Usually if you are using the clean Windows XP disk then you will have to include the RAID drivers firstly.
Without preinstalled RAID drivers the HDD will be not recognized and you will be not able to install the OS!

RAID 0 on Quicksilver

I have a plain vanilla Quicksilver, DP 800 MHz, right now has 2 80 GB ATA HDDs.
One of the drives it is failing on and off, with no pattern. These are old driver, like 8 years of so, that came with the box when I got it second hand.
I'm planning on replacing the drives with a new pair, and I wonder if I can -thru Disk Utility when re-installing- setup a RAID 0, spanning the 2 drives onto a huge 160 GB one (minus the format).
This will be done with Tiger and I don't haven any special adapter nor card, I wonder if it can be done using only Disk Utility; I know about the implications of using RAID 0 (one HDD dies, take the whole thing with it) but I can make backups to an external drive, and to a remote server with SSH + rsync.
Thanks a lot.

Hi hictio;
Rather then replacing the drives with 80 HDDs and the creating a RAID array, I would suggest that you simply get much larger HDDs that are now available to replace the old one. By going this way you avoid all of the problems with RAID. You can then have your system and applications on one drive and your project files on the other to share the workload between both drives.
Allan

Adding Drives to an Existing RAID 0 Stripe Set

I have 4 HDDs (250x1 and 320x3). While the OS is installed on the 250gb disk the rest of the three disks are striped.
I want to share files that are on my RAID Set. As OSX supports sharing of files only in the HOME directory, I now want to reinstall OSX on my stripe set.
My questions!?
1. Can OSX be installed on a striped set?
2. Can a fresh (identical) HDD be added to an existing RAID 0 set (configured using the Disk Utility)?
3. Is it possible to install OSX 10.4.x Tiger on a MAC Pro with 4 HDDs all configured as RAID 0 OR as RAID 1 (2HDDs) / RAID 0 (2 HDDs) Combination?
4. Can the default Home Directory location be changed to another volume, other than the startup volume?
Thanks in advance!

1) Yes.
2) Yes although the data on the current RAID set will be deleted.
3) Yes.
4) Yes.

Expanding RAID 5: 3 hdd - 4hdd

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