GSpeed ES Capacity Upgrade
by Steve Yu
on
Jul 8, 2009 at 4:53:50 am
Hi all,
I looked through this forum and didn't see a thread that described this question exactly, so I figured I'd pose it in case it helps others.
I have two GSpeed ES enclosures running RAID 5 with 4, 500GB drives. I am out of drive space, and would love to upgrade at least one of them to use 4, 1TB drives. I've found some Hitachi Deskstar 1TB drives that are 7200RPM with 32MB cache (the 500GB drives I have now are only 16MB cache bet). The price of these are almost half of the GTech modules, and I realize that perhaps GTech may not want us to go this route, but budget is an issue.
So here are my questions:
1) If I purchase 4 new drives, do I introduce them into my raid enclosure 1 at a time and wait for the rebuild each time to keep my current data? For example, if I add 1 drive at a time and let the RAID rebuild, will I eventually end up with a 4TB RAID that has the same data as I started with? I realize that I may have to do this overnight and leave it going for a day or so as I add each drive.
2) Can I purchase a different type of RAID enclosure and use the original 500GB Hitachi drives that came with my ES? Will other RAID 5 enclosures work with the GTech Raid Controller?
My hope is that I can get by adding new 1TB drives to my GSpeed ES, and then with another RAID 5 enclosure make use of my original drives to have even more space available. I am working on a documentary with over 500 hours of footage, so every GB counts!
Re: GSpeed ES Capacity Upgrade by Gene Gilbert on Jul 10, 2009 at 6:59:12 pm
Hi Steve,
There are a couple of issues with what you want to do. All the drives will need to be replaced at the same time, all the drives in the enclosure need to be the same capacity and model. Also, if you replace the drives in the modules, you will void your warranty. Moving the old drives to a new, different brand enclosure will also wipe the data on the drives as the RAID 5 is performed on our card. Do you need to have ALL the media available at all times? If you do you would be best off getting another enclosure and drives and keep all of it available. I understand the budget concerns, but this would give you a more efficient workflow. I hope this helps. Please let me know if you have any further questions.
Re: GSpeed ES Capacity Upgrade by Steve Yu on Jul 10, 2009 at 7:27:50 pm
Thanks Gene. So you are saying if I have 4, 500GB drives in my GSpeed ES right now, if I replace one with a Hitachi 1TB 32GB Cache drive, it will not rebuild properly? I was under the assumption that as long as you added a larger drive it would still rebuild ok, no?
I understand the warranty issues you have mentioned.
Another unrelated question -- I have two GSpeed ES enclosures and I noticed in the manual there's some instruction about building a single Raid 5 array out of two. Right now I have two separate drives using Raid 5. Forgive my ignorance about this, but would I benefit from creating just one single array from both enclosures?
Re: GSpeed ES Capacity Upgrade by Gene Gilbert on Jul 10, 2009 at 8:48:19 pm
Hi Steve,
Yes, you cannot build a larger RAID by upgrading 1 drive at a time. If you did do something like that, it would only utilize the same capacity as the other drives, so you'd be losing 500GB of capacity on the drive. As far as using 2 enclosures to build a large single volume RAID 5 would give you a larger capacity at much faster speeds.
Re: GSpeed ES Capacity Upgrade by Jonas Bendsen on Aug 1, 2009 at 12:39:48 am
It sounds like you've got two two separate G-speed units, each with 2TB (4x 500MB drives). If you were to use them together as one array, you'd get a faster, more stable (RAID 5) system that would deliver a little less than 3.5TB of storage (one of the drives would be used for parity data --the data that allows the array to "magically" rebuild itself if one of the drives fails).
On the issue of replacing drives... RAID arrays like it when you use the same drives (size, brand, model, everything). It's possible to use a different one, but you increase your chance for failure.
Also, the lowest drive capacity will be the capacity used by the array. In other words, you COULD swap a 500MB drive for a 1TB drive, but the array will still use the 1TB drive as a 500MB drive, so you're kind of wasting your money on the extra drive space.
Hope this helps!
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