Expanding Volume Under RAID 5

How do I expand the size of a volume under a RAID 5 setup (2 volumes, one RAID Set) — there is spare space available, but I cannot locate anywhere in Disk Utility or RAID Utility where I can add the space to the existing volumes.
Selecting RAID SETS in RAID Utility allows me to add a new volume, but nowhere does it allow me to increase the size of one of the current volumes.

Reformat the RAID Array.
This is required to recompute parity.
Allan

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Partition recommendations under RAID 5 in Intel Xserve

So I am preparing for a new OS X server installation on an Xserve Intel with (3) 2 TB volumes to be setup in RAID 5. Our budget would not allow the addition of an SSD drive. I would like to have two volumes under RAID 5: (1) our boot volume with OS and (1) our data and sharepoints. It would be nice to keep the OS separate from my sharepoints in case I need to do a reformat and reinstall.
Our current server setup has a RAID 1 mirrored boot volume on a G5 with an XServe RAID 5 array (all one volume unpartitioned). I also have a second FireWire hard drive connected that I use to maintain a bootable clone of our boot volume.
On our new Xserve Intel with RAID 5, is there a way to have (2) partitions under RAID 5: (1) a 150 GB boot volume and (1) an approx 3.85 TB volume that will contain all of our sharepoints. Since our server is still in transit, I do not have a machine on hand I can experiment with.
Would you create two partitions on each hard drive then join each to their respective RAID 5 array so you have two volumes—one for the OS and one for the sharepoints?
Or, with RAID 5, would it be better to keep the array as one single volume and keep the OS and sharepoints all on the same volume without any partitions? My preference would be to keep it as stable a setup as possible? Obviously, if we were to keep the OS and sharepoints as one volume, I could image the OS installation once it is stable (and without the sharepoints) and keep the image on hand just in case I needed to revert to it in case of a problem.
What would you recommend?
Thanks!

Yes, you can partition the drives as you want. The only practical way to do this is to use hardware RAID to create the RAID 5 volume with all three disks, then use Disk Utility to split this array into two partitions.
You're not going to gain much benefit from this, though. The main advantages of using different volumes for OS vs. data is for performance reasons, but you lose that here since a) you're using RAID 5 and b) all your data is on the same physical disks anyway.
About the only thing you gain is a guard against the data volume growing to the point it consumes all space on the drives and hoses your OS (because the OS is on a different volume) or vice versa, but that's a small benefit IMHO.
As for disk failure, you're no better off with partitioning than you would be with a single partition for both data and OS - either way a single disk failure will be handled by the hardware RAID card until the disk is replaced, and all your data (both OS and Data) is equally protected/at risk either way.
So my recommendation would be to use RAID 5 across all disks and be done with. No further partitioning is necessary. It is, however, your server, and you can run it however you prefer
As for the stability issue - don't bother with a disk image - it'll be outdated before you blink and will be a PITA to keep up to date.
The easier option is to create a directory for all your sharepoints and just manage your backups such that this directory is excluded from your OS backups, and included in your data backups.

Expand volume on Internal RAID

Hello,
I set up our new Xserve with three 1TB internal disks. I booted it up, and did all the initial setup. However, I made a booboo I think when migrating the volume to RAID....
Once it was up and running, I went into the RAID admin util, and told it to migrate to a RAID 5 volume.
Unfortunately, it just migrated the one disk size to the new volume, so I now have a 1.78TB RAID set, with a (slightly under) 1TB volume, and 800 odd gigs of free space.
Question is, is there any way to expand that volume out to use the entire space, or do I have to start from scratch?...

OK, well, for the benefit of others, heres how I solved it..
Got a 500G firewire disk, and used Carbon Copy Cloner to create a bootable volume on the fw disk.
Rebooted from the fw disk, and as a belts and braces approach, did a block level backup of the server disk to a .dmg file on the fw disk.
Once completed, I went into the raid utility, zapped the entire raid and recreated it with just one volume.
I then used CCC to restore the block level .dmg file back onto the newly configured raid and rebooted off the raid.
Job done. The entire process took about 45 minutes. Admittedly, there was only about 14 gig of data to move about, but was very quick all things considered.

Volumes and raid sets disappeared

I booted my machine and it gave me a question mark folder I booted it off an external drive but the internal bay hdds arent mounting. When I was looking through raid utility it says they are all good and viable disks in roaming but no raid sets or volumes are there anymore. This all happened to my xserve (2008 2.8ghz 4gb ram) Three apple brand hdd at 1TB(in a raid 5 configuration) the os I had installed on the external hdd was 10.5.3..... any ideas or thoughts to getting the raid sets or volumes back.... also Disk utility still doesnt recogonize the three internal bays is that cause for concern or do you have to have a raid set and volume before disk utility to recogonize it. Thank you for your time and insight to my problem!

Use this guide:
RAID Utility - User Guide
To delete a RAID set or a volume:
1 Open RAID Utility and choose the volume or RAID set in the left column.
2 Click Delete Volume or Delete RAID Set.

Volume Manager RAID-1 maintance procedures for X2100

Hi all,
we are using the new Sun Fire X2100 with Solaris 10 and a Volume Manager RAID-1 configuration.
Configuring Mirroring with Volume Manager isn't complicated at all (apart from some tricks necessary on x86 systems).
Does anybody know how to properly handle maintenance situations. We would like to replace a faulty disk without a need for restarting the system, switching it off or changing to single user mode. Cause the X2100's two drives are hot swappable, in principle, this should be possible, isn't it?
Thanks in advance
Regards,
gb

Hi all,
we are using the new Sun Fire X2100 with Solaris 10 and a Volume Manager RAID-1 configuration.
Configuring Mirroring with Volume Manager isn't complicated at all (apart from some tricks necessary on x86 systems).
Does anybody know how to properly handle maintenance situations. We would like to replace a faulty disk without a need for restarting the system, switching it off or changing to single user mode. Cause the X2100's two drives are hot swappable, in principle, this should be possible, isn't it?
Thanks in advance
Regards,
gb

New Volume for RAID 10

After a RAID 5 failure, I have set up my data volume as RAID 10 using 4x2TB WD Red drives. The volume shows as OK on bootup and in the
Intel Rapid Storage Technology dialogue but it does not come up as an available drive.
I have initialised it in both the Intel Rapid Storage Technology dialogue and in
Control Panel\ Administrative Tools\ Disk Management and presumably I have yet to create a new volume in
Disk Management. For RAID 10 do I select New Spanned Volume..., New Striped Volume... or New Mirrored Volume?
I don't think it can be a spanned volume but since RAID 10 is both striped and mirrored, which do I select?

Glad to here it is sloved, thanks for sharing your solution and experience here.
Regards
Yolanda
TechNet Community Support

Mac RAID card - expanding volume

Hello - I have a Mac Pro with the Apple RAID card and a three disks RAID-0 (striped) volume (which is also the boot volume).
Can I increase the volume capacity adding a disk to the volume, without having to format the raid set and start from a backup? In other words, can the raid card increase the volume capacity dinamically (and is there a guide for this?)
thanks

No. If you think of your RAID Array as three people playing cards, each gets dealt a card in turn. That is what happens with the RAID Array, data is written to each disk in turn.
If you add another player to the game, in order to be fair you must deal again. That is exactly what happens with the RAID Array, you must reformat and start over again.
Allan
Message was edited by: Allan Eckert

Unable to expand volume on array

I've got a Mac Pro (Early 2008, 8x2.8Ghz, 6GB memory) with a Highpoint RocketRaid 3522 card in it. I started out with a raid 5 array of 3 1TB WD GreenPower drives in a SuperMicro CSE-M35T-1B sata cage. Partitioned it as GUID HFS+ (1.8TB) and it works great.
However, I added two more disks and expanded the raid array to a 2.7TB Raid 6 array. Mac OS sees that I have a 2.7TB drive with a 1.8TB partition on it, but when I try to expand the partition I get the error "MediaKit reports partition (map) too small".
When I try to resize it on the command line using diskutil it complains that the volume size is too large. running "diskutil resizeVolume /dev/disk4s2 limits" tells me I can only expand the volume up to 2TB. But even running "diskutil resizeVolume /dev/disk4s2 1.9TB" fails
Apple states that the maximum volume size is 8 Exabytes as of 10.4 and later and i'm running 10.5.2.
Any suggestions? I'm trying to avoid having to back up all the data and reformatting the drive. I plan to eventually expand the array to a full 8 1TB drives, i.e. 5.4TB and backup up 1.5TB of data is rough - but backing up more than that is nearly impossible.
And yes, I do know that RAID is not a substitute for backing up. I'm comfortable with the level of protection that RAID 6 gives me given the files that I store on this drive.
Message was edited by: Scott_DC

Have you tried a PRAM reset?
http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1379
Ciao.

Expanding third party Raid on Mac OS X Server 10.4.10

We have an ACNC SCSI Raid connected to a G4 tower via an ATTO UL4S Ultra 320 SCSI card. The G4 is running Mac OS X Server 10.4.10 with the latest ATTO drivers and firmware. The ACNC Raid has four 500GB drives for a 1.5TB volume. We want to expand this with two more 500GB drives. The instructions from ACNC show to first add the two drives to the existing array which migrates the data across all drives. Next we modify the volume set to have the new 2.5TB capacity. Finally they say we must "stretch" the partition on the filesystem. They provide instructions for doing this on Windows and on Linux but on Mac OS X. Will this final step be possible on Mac OS X or have I hit a major problem? If I have, is my only solution to back this data up and rebuild the array and they bring the data back?

There is a product called VolumeWorks that is supposed to do this. I looked at the demo, but I could not get it to see the extra space so I ended up backing it all up and erasing the Raid and doing a block copy with Carbon Copy Cloner.

Need to expand Original Xserve Raid

Greetings
since my model M9721LL/A is no longer available. What should I do about expanding my current system?
Will the new VTrak system work with my current array ? or am I going to have to frog it all out ?
-j

I'm not sure what you're asking.
The XServe RAID isn't expandable past 14 drives, so if you were looking to add another array it would appear as a separate entity (e.g. new volumes on your desktop).
Sure, you could create a software RAID (e.g. RAID 0) that combined the old and the new array, but you can do that anyway - it doesn't require anything specific about the XServe RAID. Therefore you could combine a Promise RAID and an XServe RAID quite easily.

Expanding a XServe RAID and Striping

Greetings!
I have an XServe RAID with four 250 GB ADMs inside the 1-4 slots of the Upper or left controller. This one array totals 701.27 GB at RAID 5 showing up on my Desktop as one RAID.
I recently acquired two ADMs, a 750 GB and 500 GB, and I'd like to install them in my vacant second controller on the right, slots 8-9. I'm pretty sure I can create another array with these two drives setting them at RAID 5. Then what I'd like to do is stripe the two arrays, using Disk Utility, and create a software RAID that will show up on my desktop as one RAID. (I currently use this RAID as my Final Cut Pro media drive.)
My questions are: Am I on the right path?
If I stripe them together, I will lose my data on my existing array, correct? (I have the data backed up on another external drive so when I'm done I can copy it back)
I feel is best to have one RAID rather than several. Or should I consider having two RAIDs but being cognizant that I will have to stay on top of of my Final Cut Capture Scratch media folders as I edit? (ie, Two RAIDS = two separate Capture Scratch folders. So I'd have to choose what Final Cut media will be on what RAID, etc. rather than one folder where all the media can go)
My goal down the road is to completely populate the left/top controller with 250 GB ADMs. If I do, I would assume I can expand the side with the 250's by merely using the Expansion function? Would this "upset" the prospect of having a single RAID of two striped arrays?
Thanks in advance!
System: PowerMac G5 (June 2004), Mac OS 10.4.11
Xserve: Upper Controller, 4 ADMs, 250 each, 1 Array, 1 Slice, RAID 5, 701.27 GB Total

William Lloyd wrote:
This doesn't sound like a good idea. You're mixing stuff in a variety of configurations that don't match, and if you want to stripe the two sides, they should match for optimal performance.
As in: they should all be 250 GB ADMs, right?
With the 750 GB and 500 GB drives, your options are RAID 0 (with NO protection) giving ~ 1 TB of storage, or RAID 1 (mirror) giving ~450 GB of storage. The latter is probably preferable.
So I could install them into the right side controller and make an array of the two using RAID 1 (mirror) and end up with 450 GB of storage. I'll get the protection but losing the extra storage because it would defer to the smaller size 500 GB ADM. And I can't add them to the other side where the 250 GB ADMs are because you're not supposed to mix different size ADMs on the same controller. (This is the stuff that is not in Apple's fine print when they sell it to you. You find it out either through Discussion threads or Technical Articles.)
If you were to attempt to stripe this with the other side, you'd have either 1.4 TB or 900 GB of storage, respectively. In the former case, if one of the drives on the right side failed, you would lose 100% of your data on the entire volume.
My option(s) would be: install the two non-compatible sized drives into the right side controller, combine them as a RAID 1 array and then have two separate RAIDs on my desktop, with the second RAID being physically larger than the other but actually smaller because of the incompatible 750 and 500 GB sizes. Then, when editing with Final Cut, I'd have to choose which RAID that I wanted to store my media on.
So if I were you, I'd give up trying to make it look like one volume.
Agreed. But are there any other options I can explore? I purchased the 750 and 500 GB drives naively thinking I could expand the storage of my Xserve RAID by buying larger drives. Now I'm finding out I should have purchased only 250 GB ADMs-- but they weren't available from Apple when I was able to purchase additional drives and no one told me otherwise. Until now.
Thanks for your learned reply. I guess I should have consulted with you/Xserve RAID Discussions before buying anything.

How do I expand my apple raid

I have an apple raid card in my Mac pro. I have set it up as a Raid 5 with Three internal 1.5 TB drives. I just replaced one with a 3tb drive. However the capacity did not increase. I looked at the manual and it tells me:
Expanding a Volume
You can use the command line to expand (add space to) an existing volume from the
available space on the RAID set that hosts it. Expanding a volume doesn’t affect data
already on the volume.
To expand a volume:
m Open Terminal and enter the following command:
$ sudo raidutil modify volume --expand -n volume -s size
where volume is the name of the volume as shown by the raidutil list volumeinfo
command and size is the amount of space you want to add to the volume.
For more information, see the raidutil man page.
So I opened terminal and put in what it says. However terminal keeps getting stuck. below is what its saying. If anyone can tell me what I am doing wrong that would be awesome. I'm not sure why Apple put in such a round about expandtion any way.
NYCretoucher-Remote:~ nisian$ sudo raidutil modify volume R1V1 --expand -n volume R1V1 -s size 700g
Required argument missing: '--rewrite', or '--verify', '--move', '--expand'.
usage: raidutil <global-options> modify volume <required-arguments> <optional-arguments>
    global-options:
        [--controller <ControllerType> | -c <ControllerType>]
        [--terse | -t]
        [--verbose | -v]
        [--version | -V]
    --expand | -e
        required arguments:
            --name <VolumeName> | -n <VolumeName>
            --size <SizeToExpandVolume> | -s <SizeToExpandVolume>
        optional arguments:
            --raidset <RAIDSetName> | -r <RAIDSetName>
            --waitfortask | -W
    --move | -m
        required arguments:
            --names <VolumeName> | -n <VolumeName>
            --targetraidset <TargetRAIDSetName> | -t <TargetRAIDSetName>
            --raidset <RAIDSetName> | -r <RAIDSetName>
        optional arguments:
            --waitfortask | -W
    --rewrite | -w
        required arguments:
            --name <VolumeName> | -n <VolumeName>
        optional arguments:
            --priority <ServicePriority> | -p <ServicePriority>
            --raidset <RAIDSetName> | -r <RAIDSetName>
            --waitfortask | -W
    --verify | -v
        required arguments:
            --name <VolumeName> | -n <VolumeName>
        optional arguments:
            --priority <ServicePriority> | -p <ServicePriority>
            --raidset <RAIDSetName> | -r <RAIDSetName>
            --waitfortask | -W
NYCretoucher-Remote:~ nisian$ sudo raidutil modify volume R1V1 --expand
Required argument missing: '--rewrite', or '--verify', '--move', '--expand'.
usage: raidutil <global-options> modify volume <required-arguments> <optional-arguments>
    global-options:
        [--controller <ControllerType> | -c <ControllerType>]
        [--terse | -t]
        [--verbose | -v]
        [--version | -V]
    --expand | -e
        required arguments:
            --name <VolumeName> | -n <VolumeName>
            --size <SizeToExpandVolume> | -s <SizeToExpandVolume>
        optional arguments:
            --raidset <RAIDSetName> | -r <RAIDSetName>
            --waitfortask | -W
    --move | -m
        required arguments:
            --names <VolumeName> | -n <VolumeName>
            --targetraidset <TargetRAIDSetName> | -t <TargetRAIDSetName>
            --raidset <RAIDSetName> | -r <RAIDSetName>
        optional arguments:
            --waitfortask | -W
    --rewrite | -w
        required arguments:
            --name <VolumeName> | -n <VolumeName>
        optional arguments:
            --priority <ServicePriority> | -p <ServicePriority>
            --raidset <RAIDSetName> | -r <RAIDSetName>
            --waitfortask | -W
    --verify | -v
        required arguments:
            --name <VolumeName> | -n <VolumeName>
        optional arguments:
            --priority <ServicePriority> | -p <ServicePriority>
            --raidset <RAIDSetName> | -r <RAIDSetName>
            --waitfortask | -W
NYCretoucher-Remote:~ nisian$

Three problems with this:
1. My understanding is that the Apple RAID card doesn't support drives larger than 2.2TB in size.
2. RAID 5 requires all drives to be the same size in order for more space to be available, then the file system needs to be grown.
3. The odds of an unrecoverable read error in the course of rebuilding a 3TB consumer SATA hard drive is actually rather high. 1 bit error in 1E14 is the most typical URE published by hard drive manufacturers for consumer SATA, and that translates to 11.4 TB, that is ever 11.4.TB of read, 1 bit error is expected. In the event of an unrecoverable read error, the reconstruction is halted. And a 3 disk RAID 5 means you're reading 6TB of data to rebuild the 3rd drive. So your statistical chance of failure is in the vicinity of 50/50. Not good odds. Therefore you already need to consider RAID 6, or RAID 10 (or RAID 1 + linear which is growable by adding 2 disks of the same size at a time, which can be different sizes than the disks already in the linear array).

VolumeWorks CANNOT expand RocketRaid 2220 RAID 5 array ! ! !

Well, I recently OCE/OLRM my RAID-0 1 TB array into a RAID-5 1.5 TB array.
I noticed after that time that OS X still reported the array as the same size.
I thought to myself, 'self ..... ***?'
So I went into disk utility and found that I had to ADD another partiton to account for the new space.
I googled.
Found a program called 'VolumeWorks'
Short story, VolumeWorks cannot expand the array partiton to 1.5 TB
Any ideas on how to expand the partition to ~1.5 TB (it's about 1.39675 TiB)?
I e-mailed them but expect a ignorant reply.
I will post on this and see if I can get a refund.
For now DO NOT use this program.
It just plain doesn't work.
PERIOD!

sadly, volumeworks completely erased my array of almost 931 GB
NEVER use this software period.

Unable to Expand nodes under Migrated Content.

Hi all,
We have recently installed EP 7.0 and we have uploaded the Business Packages Specific to CRM 5.0.But under Migrated Content--> EP 5.0 I'm not able to drill down further.I'm able to see the Folders like Iviews, Pages,Roles etc..But I'm unable to expand these folders further.Like if I want to see all the roles present in the roles Folder i'm not able to do so.But the roles are present and I can see them if I search them in Identity management.
Can someone help me on this.
thanks and regards,
Vijaya Sai.V

Hi,
This folder would be empty in case of fresh install, i also have it empty.
The business package deployed sits under
Content Administration -- Portal Content -- Content delivered by SAP --
Hope this helps,
Chetan

Expand volume on mac mini

Can I expand and contract the volume at will using a combination of the internal and external drive on a mac mini? For example, I'm considering purchasing a mac mini with a 500GB HD and later add contiguous volume space by adding an external USB or Thunderbolt drive. Is this possible?

It is, but "involved", 2012 Mini same as 2011 Mini...
http://eshop.macsales.com/installvideos/mac_mini2011_hd/
But I wouldn't waste my time, especially since you mentioned thunderbolt in your forst post, just boot off a bigger/faster external drive.

Expanding Volume Under RAID 5

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