Good day,
We have a DL360 G7 that was unfortunately conigured with small 7200K rotation drives. In order to continue using it we need to upgrade the drives both in rotation speed and size. The four current drives are organized into two RAID1 arrays.
I believe we have three upgrade choices for this, but I wanted to confirm that to be the case.
Option one would be to create an artificial drive failure by shutting down, pulling a drive and bringing it back up. After recognizing the failure we could hot plug the new larger/faster drive and let the raid rebuild. Once the rebuild process completes we repeat with the second pair. Afterwards we could expand the arrays to use the capacity and we'd be done.
Option two is to make a backup image of the system, install and configure the new drives using the ROM utility, then restore the image onto the new drives.
Option three is to create a real drive failure by simply pulling on of the existing drives, then install the new one in its place and repeat for set 2. After rebuild repeat process for remaining drives.
I am curious about the relative merits of each method.. I am leaning towards Option two because it is the safest choice, but I wanted to get some feedback on several details.
First question: In all but option two we would have a RAID1 combining drives of different sizes/rotations/latency specs. Is such a RAID relaible and stable enough to run for a week (this is all off hours work) ??
Second question: How much risk is injected by using the much faster option 3 rather than option 1 ?
Obviously option 2 would generate a longer interruption than the others (due to the need to image out and back in the full contents of the system). It would however only mean one interruption rather than two. The main differences between one and three are downtime and risk from hot plugging drives.
Last question: since all of the equipmen is hot-plug capable how much risk is there to the old drives for yanking them and the new for plugging them (we intend to reuse the drives) ?
Thanks in advance for any help and guidance..
