Adding disks to an existing array

Some controllers support adding disks to existing RAID level 5 or 6 disk arrays, which allows you to dynamically increase the capacity of a disk array while preserving its existing data.

Adding disks to an existing RAID 5 or 6 disk array can dynamically increase the capacity of a disk array while preserving existing data in the disk array. After you add disks to an existing disk array, the disks are protected and become part of the disk array, but will not contain parity and the data will not be restriped. Extensive use of this feature results in performance penalties because of the following reasons.

Not all the disks in the disk array contain parity and therefore the disks with parity are accessed more often for parity updates.
Data is not restriped and this reduces the ability to use the hardware assisted stripe write features.

Note: Some controllers might not support adding of disks to an existing array. See the feature comparison tables of PCIe3, PCIe2, and PCIe, and PCI-X cards to identify controllers that support this feature.

Run the iprconfig utility by typing iprconfig.
Select Work with disk arrays.
Select Add a device to a disk array.
Select the disk array to which you want to add the disks.
Select the eligible disks to be included into the disk array, and then press Enter.
Attention: All data on the selected drives will be lost when the disks are added to the existing array.
If a particular disk is not included in the list, it may not be a candidate that can be added to the array because of one or more of the following reasons:
- The disk's capacity is less than that of the smallest disk already in the array.
- The disk has not been formatted for Advanced Function.
- The disk belongs to another disk array or is configured as a Hot Spare.
To include the disks, press Enter. To exclude the disks from the disk array, type q to cancel.

Last updated: Wed, May 24, 2017