Expand storage on PERC H710 RAID 0 Dell Poweredge R620

Question

I can't find any good tutorials online. It's my first server and I don't know much.

I have a RAID 0 and I want to expand storage without losing my data? Is it the same process for a RAID 5?

I've read that is possible to expand storage on a RAID 0/RAID 5. Correct me if I'm wrong. I'm running Ubuntu server OS

Answer 1

The process is the same for all modes. If you have Dell OMSA installed, for example, you can initiate expansion through the web UI.

However, Dell has a document that lists which expansions and/or conversions are possible, and it strongly implies that only 1-disk RAID 0 "arrays" can be expanded; a multi-disk array no longer expandable.

If it's your first server, probably the far more important thing to know is that with RAID 0, you inevitably will lose data at some point in the future. Even though the 'R' usually stands for 'Redundant', RAID 0 is the mode that provides exactly zero redundancy – as soon as a single disk fails, the entire array is gone.

So if you've reached the point where you need to expand a RAID 0 array and you don't want to lose data, then it's probably unwise to actually expand that RAID 0 – it's better to take the opportunity to migrate to RAID 5/6. (According to the document, a multi-disk RAID 0 array is convertible to RAID 5/6, and you should probably take the opportunity to do so.)