PowerEdge 2400 adding addtional hard drives 1

[Carlitos71]

I have a PowerEdge 2400 with a Perc 2/Si RAID Controller that is almost out of space. It currently has 2 36Gb SCSI drives running RAID 1. Would it be safe to assume that I can add 2 additional hard drives to the existing controller? Does anyone have any recommendations? This is my first time and I am a relative noob when it comes to something like this. Thanks for the help.

 

[NickFerrar]

Shouldn't be a problem to add two more disks and create a second RAID 1 container. If you want to have one container with all 4 disks in that's a bit more hassle and would really require a backup/restore.

 

[Carlitos71]

If I create a 2nd container, can you still merge the two partitions and see it as large drive? There is a 30gb D drive and I wanted to add an 80Gb drive to it. Is 110Gb too large? And if it is not a problem, I am assuming that Partition Magic would work with it. Correct? Thanks.

 

[xmsre]

You place disk into a RAID group. From the RAID group, you carve out logical disk to present to the OS. The OS sees each disk you presented as a seperate physical disk, that is the point and purpose of the virtualization layer of the RAID controller. Do not confuse this with a windows logical disk, it's not the same thing. You mentioned creating a second RAID group. A utility like partition magic is not going to help you in this instance.

To extend the size of an existing drive, you'll have to add disks to the existing RAID group then extend the existing LUN; if the RAID cards supports it that is. Some cards do and some cards don't, you'll have to check the manual for your specific card. Assuming that your card does support expansion of existing LUNs, you would use a utility like partition magic to increase the size of the logical drive after the RAID hardware increases the size of the LUN [which the OS sees as a physical drive].