leicray wrote:
I have four 1 TB SATA disks connected to a 3Ware 9500S-4LP RAID controller card. They are configured as two separate units with pairs of disks in RAID 1 (mirrored). I'd like to combine all four disks into a RAID 10 array which entails combining the two existing units. However, there does not seem to be support for this procedure at BIOS level. Instead, it looks like it needs to be done using the 3DM2 Disk Management software.
My M2 NAS boots from a USB stick and has no drives other than four disks attched to the RAID card. So, what's the best way to proceed? The first option is to just forget about RAID 10 and keep two separate 1 TB RAID 1 drives. The second is to set up some sort of bootable drive (hard disk, CD-ROM, Flash drive) and run the Disk Management software from that.
I'd be grateful for any thoughts and specific guidance on how best to proceed with the second option.
Many thanks,
Raymond
Raymond
You are quite right you would have to use the 3DM2 software to do this and be warned it will take a fair amount of time to do this. I recently grew a raid5 array from 4 to 5 disks for a friend using that method and it took over a week to complete. We had to install a seperate HD with Win XP on it just to do this very task (we got the xp to boot by changing the boot order in the bios so that we didnt mess with the NL system at all). one good thing about the 3ware cards is that once you set the migration going it will continue in the background so that you could boot up the NL box and use it at least that was true for growing the R5 array but you are changing the whole scheme of things there so it may not hold true. You may also find that NL will not see the new array correctly and will want the thing re formated, We also found that growing the array was fine but the partition table did not reflect the new size so it would have had to have the tables modified with a linux live cd and whatever utility could be found to do this job and as I aint a linux expert we ended up reformatting the array and copying the data back to it ( we had already backed it up to my backup server before we started).
Do you have anywhere you can copy the data to and then just generate the array you want from scratch reformat in Nl and copy the data back it would be far quicker that way.
Hope this helps a little
Doug