Upgrading disks in an AMD mobo RAID mirror on N40L

[Drashna Jaelre 157]

Theoretically, it should continue to work on that system till you move it again...

[ikon 438]

If only...

[Drashna Jaelre 157]

That's the way it tends to go .... Theory and practice tend to be very different.

[ikon 438]

OMG! Really? I had no idea!

[LoneWolf 156]

That's the way it tends to go .... Theory and practice tend to be very different.

 

Yes.  The difference between "in theory" and "in practice" is that in theory, everything works in practice.

[ikon 438]

LOL.

[Gary Pickard 0]

I finally have a bit of time to have a go at this

 

Rather than have a 3TB hanging around on my desk with a power cable and eSATA lead plugged in I went for one of these rather the popoular ICYDOCK

Akasa AK-IEN-01 Lokstor M51 2.5 inch and 3.5 inch HDD Combo Rack

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B00919K2MC/ref=oh_details_o05_s00_i00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

 

It is a little bit more expensive but the disks are fully enclosed - the N40L seems to be very good at sucking in dust.  Very impressed with the quality and comes with plenty of cables.  The one thing I would change is that it has a small on/off switch at the front - a little too close to the 3.5inch drive bay cover as well.  I have some tape over this at the moment but might get the hot glue gun out for some added safety.

 

What I can tell you is that you cannot just migrate from a 2TB to a 3TB disk by swapping one of your mirrored pair over.  I thought it worth a try just in case - it will mirror but only to 2TB

 

I am now at the start of a very long file backup - Acronis is quoting 2+ days for 1.3TB - it seems way too long.  Once safely backed up time to try and break the mirror

[jmwills 284]

This may be a four step process if you are replacing both 2TB drives with 2 x 3TB drives.  Break the mirror, insert the new 3TB drive and the new mirror will only see 2 of the 3TB (as expected).  Remove the second drive and replace with another 3TB drive and again only 2TB will be recognized, I would think.

 

Break the mirror again, convert drive 1 to GPT, copy data from 2 to 1; convert drive 2 to GPT and recreate the mirror.  I'm thinking this might work.

[Gary Pickard 0]

I might have a problem with the convert to GPT phase

 

After I had a quick go at seeing if the moboRAID was smart enough to expand I then popped this disk on the eSATA port and went to reformat it.  It was a real pain as Windows could not initialize because of clash of disk IDs (I am guessing it had picked up the same ID as its mirror pair which was still on the controller).  I managed to get it reformatted using Acronis to initialize it.

 

This is proving a lot more painful than I had hoped.  I have a feeling that when I break the mirror the data will be wiped - when I had a dig around in RAIDxpert and the BIOS RAID there were lots of warnings about data loss

 

Any thoughts gratefully received

 

Gary

[jmwills 284]

Copy the data off to an external and make life easy.