Two WD 80GB installed... nice drives...

[Stan]

I've finally made up my mind and bought 2 WD 80 (8mb) for my Win 2000 server. It was running 2 IBM 40GB and space was becoming a problem.

I wanted to get all the files (system, data and pgms) on the new WD but I was not going to reinstall everything.
It took me less than one hour to transfer everything from the old arary (IBM RAID1 40GB) to the new array (WD RAID1 80GB).

I installed the new WD, configure them as RAID1 in the FastTrak BIOS.
In Win2000 Disk Mngt, I used mirroring to "copy" all files accross. At that stage I was using "double mirroring". Each partition were actually sitting on hardware RAID1 array (200% fault tolerant :) ).
Once this was done, I rebooted the PC and made the WD RAID1 80GB the bootable array.
Back in Win2000 Disk Mngt, I broke the mirror and deleted the partition on the IBM 40GB RAID1 array.
All done!!

Now, I have enough space to last another 4 years...

Stan

[Mntsnow]

Nicely done Stan :)

[BBA]

Yea...cool method. How long did it take you to think that up?

[Stan]

I've been thinking of upgrading this server for the last 2-3 weeks. And while I was waiting for the right price (i.e. the lowest possible), I thought about the quickest (and easiest) way to do this upgrade.

My initial plan was to replace the 40GB HD in 2 stages:
- remove 1st 40GB, replace with 1st 80GB and let RAID controller to re-sync the array
- remove 2nd 40GB and replace with 2nd 80GB and let RAID controller to re-sync again.
I thought that I would have been able to use the extra 40GB of HD space but I discovered that Win2000 would not see it because the array would still "think" that the new 80GB HD are the same old two 40GB...

So I thought to myself "Why not keep the 40GB and add the two 80GB?" (it was a bit sad to remove 2 perfectly working 40GB HD and abandon them in one of my desk drawers)
I kept thinking about the mirroring idea… there was no way I was going to re-install everything. That’s how I had the idea to create a 2nd RAID1 array and use Win2000 mirroring to “copy” the data across the 2 arrays.
I was glad to see that you could specify in the FastTrak BIOS which array to boot with…. otherwise all that work would have been pointless…

The good thing is that the upgrade was completed in approx 2 hours...

Stan