adding space to C drive on a Poweredge R410

Question

Hi All:

I have a Dell PowerEdge R410 with three SAS 300 gig 10K physical drives in slots 0, 1, and 2. There is a fourth drive slot that is unused. This is a server that has been around for a while that I have inherited. It runs some of our main communication software so it is difficult to find a maintenance window for it. Since it is RAID 5, the third disk is being used as the parity disk. The server is running 2008 R2 Standard Edition.

The server is running a single virtual disk in a 557.75 GB RAID 5 configuration. The single virtual disk contains C, D, and E partitions and C is the location of the Windows installation. I do have OpenManage installed on the server.

Under Device Manager/Disk Drives, Windows shows a single DELL PERC H700 SCSI Disk Device. Disk Management shows just a Basic Disk 0 with a 557.75 GB of space with a System, C, D, and E partition all of which are healthy.

I need to somehow increase the amount of space on the C drive as it is down to just 3 or 4 gigs free. I have not found anything file wise on the C drive that I can delete or move that will give me a large amount of space that I am comfortable with moving or deleting.

The D drive has over 300 gigs of free space and the E drive has over 50 gigs of free space. So, both of these are fine. Unfortunately, I don't think I can move any free space from one of these letters over to C because of how RAID works.

So, with the PowerEdge R410, if I got another SAS 300 gig 10K drive and plugged it into the fourth slot, can the RAID 5 array have that space added across the partitions on the virtual disk? Or is this fourth slot only for a hot spare type configuration?

I think another option might be to replace the existing physical drives one at a time with a larger capacity SAS drive (if that exists). Once all three of them are replaced with a bigger physical drive, I believe this would increase the space on the RAID array. But I'm not sure how that space would be distributed across the C, D, and E drives.

Thanks so much in advance for any advice! I appreciate it!!

Drew

Daniel My · Answer

Hello

The H700 supports Online Capacity Expansion. It is also referred to as reconfigure or RAID level migration. I think the H700 only supports reconfigure operations from system management software like OpenManage Server Administrator. You should have a reconfigure task on the virtual disk from within OMSA. You can find more information in the controller manual and the OMSA manual.

http://www.dell.com/storagecontrollermanuals/

http://www.dell.com/openmanagemanuals/

The operating system partitions will not change when you increase the virtual disk size. Partition manipulation is done from within the operating system. I think 2008R2 has built in partition extension capabilities. You can only extend a partition if there is space at the end of the partition you want to extend.

For instance, if you have C, D, and E partitions on the same disk you will only be able to extend E. When a new partition is created on the same disk it starts at the end of the previous partition. If you want to extend C you will need to delete D and E to create free space at the end of C. You should be able to find more information about Windows Disk Management in operating system documentation or KB articles.

Thanks

DrewFromNC1 · Answer

Thanks so much for the reply Daniel!

Sounds like not many options then. I definitely don't have any space at the end of the C partition or any of the others for that matter.

And even if I one at a time replaced the three drives with a larger capacity drive, it sounds like you are saying that will just increase the virtual drive size. I think that means the new space would just show up after E and thus changing to larger hard drives would only allow me to extend the rightmost (E:) partition.

I do have OpenManage installed on the server. And I do have the reconfigure task available as a choice on the virtual disk. Can that be used to increase space on the C:\ drive?

Thanks so much!

Drew

Daniel My · Answer

No, the reconfigure task is for the virtual disk. It does not change partitions.

There may be partition software available that will allow you to manipulate the partitions in ways that are not possible with Windows Disk Management. I am not aware of any to be able to suggest, but you may want to search online to see if such software exists.

D00B1983 · Answer

I am currently in a similar boat to the op here. I have an R610 with an H700 with 2 x 128GB SSD's in Raid 1 which have the OS on. The two drives are now full and I need to replace them with larger drivers.

I guess my question is, can I just swap out a drive at a time and replace with larger ones, then increase the partition size with Windows management once the rebuild has taken place?

Dell-DylanJ · Answer

Hello,

I believe that you can do so, but the operation is not supported and not something I can recommend. I would encourage you to make a backup before attempting, but I do believe that I have seen this done successfully. The users I've seen do this successfully replaced one drive, let it fully rebuild replaced the next one, let it fully rebuild, and then expanded the array through OpenManage.

theflash1932 · Answer

If you rebuild the drives one at a time, your array will stay the SAME size, so you won't see any additional Unpartitioned Space to extend into in Disk Management.

I can't remember if it is the H700 or the H710 that introduced the ability to expand an array into available RAID space on the disks. 1) Make sure your RAID drivers and firmware are up to date, then rebuild them one at a time, then in OMSA, go to Storage, PERC, Virtual Disks, and choose Reconfigure from the dropdown menu of Available Tasks for the RAID 1.

ONCE the array has been reconfigured, then you can go into Disk Management and simply extend the C: drive.

PowerEdge HDD/SCSI/RAID

adding space to C drive on a Poweredge R410

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