Raid 5 adding drives,and what if?

[Adysthemic]

Group,
I have a Dell PE 4400 Perc3/Di.It has 8 HS drive bays.I have configured the
first 4 drives in a Raid 5 container.Loaded win2k server.
Can I populate the other 4 bays and add them to the array without starting
all over?If I can in fact, do this,if more than one drive fails in a raid 5
arrray does it still mean disaster?I.E. in a raid 5 ,3 drive array, if two
drives fail....doh.If you have 8 drives in the array and 2 fail, does it
still kill the system?tnx Adysthemic

 

[Ron Reaugh]

Group,
I have a Dell PE 4400 Perc3/Di.It has 8 HS drive bays.I have configured the
first 4 drives in a Raid 5 container.Loaded win2k server.
Can I populate the other 4 bays and add them to the array without starting
all over?If I can in fact, do this,if more than one drive fails in a raid 5
arrray does it still mean disaster?I.E. in a raid 5 ,3 drive array, if two
drives fail....doh.If you have 8 drives in the array and 2 fail, does it
still kill the system?

Yes, DOA.

 

[Adysthemic]

raid

Yes, DOA.

Thanks for the info Ron, do you have any answer to the first part of the
question,tnx

 

[dg]

It probably has a function built in just for this. Check with dell for the
tech specs of the controller. In my experience, dells tech info is top
notch for their high end stuff like Perc controllers. If you feel up to it
you may even just pop into the raid setup and see what kind of options you
are presented.

--Dan

 

[Benno...]

Group,
I have a Dell PE 4400 Perc3/Di.It has 8 HS drive bays.I have configured the
first 4 drives in a Raid 5 container.Loaded win2k server.
Can I populate the other 4 bays and add them to the array without starting

Yes you probably can. If you are running Windows 2000 you probably can
even add the new diskspace to existing partitions with the MS tool
'diskpart.exe'.

all over?If I can in fact, do this,if more than one drive fails in a raid 5
arrray does it still mean disaster?I.E. in a raid 5 ,3 drive array, if two
drives fail....doh.If you have 8 drives in the array and 2 fail, does it
still kill the system?tnx Adysthemic

Yes, no matter how many drives you use for RAID5 there is only one
parity drive. It's a good idea to have an online (or hot) spare drive so
if one disk fails it will be directly rebuilt on the spare disk.
If you want better reliability you'll need 'RAID6' that uses 2 parity
drives and therefor can handle 2 simultaneous disk fails. However once
you start going there other factors might be more likely to fail (the
mainboard, PSU, RAID controller, OS bugs, user error ect)

B.