SBS 2003 Software Raid Mirror - Replacing higher capacity disks.

Hello, we've got a server with two 160GB disks running a Windows-based
software RAID mirror across them. The disks are at capacity, and we'd
like to replace the drives with two higher capacity units.

With previous raid controllers, we were able to break the mirror,
install a higher-capacity drive, rebuild the mirror, and repeat for
the remaining drive, subsequently adding a new partition.

My question is if this will work with the Windows 2003 SBS software
RAID or do we need to look at imaging the drive? Other posts I've
located on this forum are somewhat contradictory on this particular
topic.

aus
Mon May 05 09:28:02 PDT 2008

amiejackson09@gmail.com wrote:
> Hello, we've got a server with two 160GB disks running a Windows-based
> software RAID mirror across them. The disks are at capacity, and we'd
> like to replace the drives with two higher capacity units.
>
> With previous raid controllers, we were able to break the mirror,
> install a higher-capacity drive, rebuild the mirror, and repeat for
> the remaining drive, subsequently adding a new partition.
>
> My question is if this will work with the Windows 2003 SBS software
> RAID or do we need to look at imaging the drive? Other posts I've
> located on this forum are somewhat contradictory on this particular
> topic.
>
>

Hi, if you are not using a RAID controller then the software mirroring
only allows you to recreate a mirror of the same size to the new disk -
so you can't expand it.

However if you then just want to add the extra space as an additional
subsequent partition, after the initial mirror, then you can do that
without issue.


You would be well advised to get a RAID controller to handle the
mirroring during your upgrade as they are not much these days; even the
Host RAID which rely on the device driver to do much of the work (as
opposed to dedicated processor on the card) are faster and more
efficient than the Windows software only method.