Geek pop quiz.
Sep. 14th, 2011 11:34 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
theweaselkingI'm looking at increasing the size of a Win7 machine's hard disk, without reinstalling the OS.
Difficulty: It's currently 3x500GB HW RAID-5, for a total of a 1TB disk that the OS thinks is a single disk.
2TB Disks are currently reasonably cheap - going to 3 of them for a "4TB" disk that the OS thinks is a single drive would be nice, but the problem is how to get there, from here.
If life were easy, I'd just swap one drive and sync, swap a second and sync, swap the third and the RAID controller would magically notice that hey it now has 3x2TB disks and would I like to expand the RAID size to match? But life isn't easy.
So: What's my best option, here? Set up a second RAID (I THINK I have three more ports on the RAID card...), mirror all the files across, boot from the second RAID, Bob's your uncle and handle the HDD size mismatch from inside the OS? Create a disk image on a spare disk, swap the RAID disks, pull the disk image back across? Give it up as lost, install Win7 on the new RAID, pull applications and settings across and "rejoice" in the opportunity to clean the thing out?
Difficulty: It's currently 3x500GB HW RAID-5, for a total of a 1TB disk that the OS thinks is a single disk.
2TB Disks are currently reasonably cheap - going to 3 of them for a "4TB" disk that the OS thinks is a single drive would be nice, but the problem is how to get there, from here.
If life were easy, I'd just swap one drive and sync, swap a second and sync, swap the third and the RAID controller would magically notice that hey it now has 3x2TB disks and would I like to expand the RAID size to match? But life isn't easy.
So: What's my best option, here? Set up a second RAID (I THINK I have three more ports on the RAID card...), mirror all the files across, boot from the second RAID, Bob's your uncle and handle the HDD size mismatch from inside the OS? Create a disk image on a spare disk, swap the RAID disks, pull the disk image back across? Give it up as lost, install Win7 on the new RAID, pull applications and settings across and "rejoice" in the opportunity to clean the thing out?
(no subject)
Date: 2011-09-14 06:57 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-09-14 07:03 pm (UTC)And then just stick a single drive in my PC.
Now all of the movies, music, etc. is on that, and it can happily deal with upgrading hard drives without an issue. And stream to the 360/PS3 under the TV, and the music streamer in the kitchen, and any random laptop. Oh, and do my torrenting. And it sucks up a lot less power than my desktop does. So that's nice.
(This will almost certainly not suit your requirements. I'm just rambling.)