[daveyfl]

I'm wondering if anyone is familiar with the Broadcom Raidcor BC4000 series cards? I need help with replacing drives on a raidcore bc4452. Currently the machine has 3 120gb drives. I want to swap these out for 3 1TB drives, one at a time, letting the array rebuild each time. Once this has completed I will transform the array to expand it into the usable space, and then use diskpart under windows server 2003 to expand the non-bootable partitions. Does this sound feasible? Can I hot swap the drives and will the rebuild start automatically each time?

thx

[Kevin OBrien]

Is the system live and in production right now? Do you have enough space to backup all the data on the current array before the drive swap process? Usually a suggestion regardless of the RAID card in play is to take your old array offline, build the new array from scratch, and then copy or clone your old data over for the least chance of errors occurring.

[daveyfl]

 Kevin OBrien, on 25 February 2012 - 03:49 PM, said:

Is the system live and in production right now? Do you have enough space to backup all the data on the current array before the drive swap process? Usually a suggestion regardless of the RAID card in play is to take your old array offline, build the new array from scratch, and then copy or clone your old data over for the least chance of errors occurring.

Hi Kevin,

the system is in production with no backup server to put in it's place. the data is backed up nightly to another machine so at least I have a backup if all went south. I'd like to try and do the swaps in production because taking the array offline would mean a reinstall of Windows 2003 Server as the array has two partitions, a boot and a data storage partition.

[Kevin OBrien]

 daveyfl, on 25 February 2012 - 05:55 PM, said:

Hi Kevin,

the system is in production with no backup server to put in it's place. the data is backed up nightly to another machine so at least I have a backup if all went south. I'd like to try and do the swaps in production because taking the array offline would mean a reinstall of Windows 2003 Server as the array has two partitions, a boot and a data storage partition.

As long as full backups are in place, taking that first step to see if the array can even handle a drive failure (drive yanked) gracefully might be a good start. It would also give an indication of how long the process might take as well as sort out any errors early on.