Replacing Hard Drives in Server/s

Bonjour · 6 Oct 2008 at 20:02

I'm wanting to upgrade the storage on some of my servers at work.

For example, in our PDC we have 3x160GB HDDs in a RAID 5 array. This is vastly inadequate for our 2000 or so users.

My thinking was to ghost the current RAID 5 array to another networked hard drive, create another RAID array with larger capacity hard drives and then ghost the image back.

Does anyone know of any reason why this wouldn't work?

Obviously we will be revising our backup solution at the same time.

Thanks.

hernaldo · 6 Oct 2008 at 20:19

It would work better without all the jargon uninformed 90s tech talk for noobs

(jk).

This is pretty simple, your idea is completely right.

1. Get Acronis True Image (THE "HOME" VERSION IS FINE!!!!!)

2. Do a full backup of your current setup to some external storage (Just get a cheapy 500GB external thingy then create a restore cd from within true image, its a bootable dos version of true image).

3. Take out old drives and swap with new ones...

4. Create array with new drives in whatever config u like.

5. Boot with the True Image restore cd (set bios to boot from cd

6. Restore your image to your new hard drives

hernaldo · 6 Oct 2008 at 20:21

btw....sorry, yep you could just use a network share drive instead of an external drive.

True image supports this no probs both in dos\windows.

Don't bother with any of the more "corporate" backup rubbish from the likes of symantec etc. (checkout reviews for more info if needs be).

Bonjour · 6 Oct 2008 at 20:24

Cheers mate. Much appreciated.

Just wanted some clarification before I ploughed ahead.