Upgrade server hard drive for more space

[donte10]

I have a new client who has a Small Business Server 2003 used as a file server and Exchange for a 3 person office. This server has a partitioned hard drive that is running out of space and I would like to upgrade the hard drive for more space. The server has a partitioned 80GB hard drive with a c logical drive that has a 16GB space and 64GB partitioned for data.

partition 1 is drive C is 16GB with only 4GB free
partition 2 is drive D is 74GB with 20GB free (Data)

It also is setup in a RAID 1 configuration with another mirrored drive. What would be the best route to take to increase the size of the drive? What would it take to swap this drive(s) out for larger ones?

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

Wow...not much room here.

2 approaches ..even 3...I've done both of quite a few times.

*If the RAID controller is a decent one (read...not an onboard Intel fake-RAID) ...and it supports online disk expansion...you can do this approach. Replace both hard drives with larger ones..say a pair of 320 gig drives. Replace first drive with larger one...mirror will break...rebuild mirror. When that's done...yank second drive...replace with larger one...rebuild mirror. Do the RAID expansion in the controller to "grab" the extra 240 gigs. Now you'll have a 320 gig RAID volume...but the OS will still see only it's 16 gig C and a 64 gig D. Use something like Paragon Server Disk Manager to resize your volumes.

*A different approach. The preferred approach. If the RAID controller supports more drives...purchase a pair of..say...320 gig drives. Add them as a 3rd and 4th drive...create a RAID 1 mirror. Format, make a volume. Using a disk cloning utility...copy the servers D drive to this new volume. Or..use something like NT Backup. re-assign drive letters. After testing for a few days to ensure functionality of that big new data volume that the infostore and data is happily living on now..delete the original 64 gig D partition. Now...using partition management software...stretch the C drive to use all of the 80 gigs now...eating up that original 60 gigs that the D drive used to be. Create another pagefile on this volume. This approach really is better for SBS...the OS is on one spindle..and the data volume/infostore is on another spindle. Better concurrent drive hits/performance.