The nice people of PSquared built our main Myriad PC in 2002, installing 2 50GB hard drives in a Raid Array. Not understanding much about Raid, I am at a loss as to how I can replace the now full disks with a pair of bigger ones.

I would wish to copy all the songs, databases, etc onto the new drive(s). If I do it to one, does the Raid thingy do the rest?

Any help / clues would be appreciated.

Thanks,

Bob Chadwick, Birch Radio, Rochdale

[quote:bea2c70592=\"Bob Chadwick\"]Any help / clues would be appreciated.[/quote]

Do the drives show up as one 50Gb drive or one 100GB drive?

If the former then just turn the PC off, pull out one of the drives and put a new one (this should work if you only have a simple RAID mirror set up). Leave the PC for a while and it should clone the data over. Then power it down again, take out the final 50GB drive and put in the second new larger disk. It will then copy the data over. Keep the original drives in a safe place until you are sure that you have got all your data off them.

If they show up as one 100GB drive your best bet will be to see if your PC has a \"primary\" and \"secondary\" IDE chanel as well as a RAID array. In which case you can shove your new drive in (which better be bigger than 100GB) and mirror the two 50s onto the 100. You can then put the new 100+ drives in the RAID array and boot it. If you go this way make sure that you set the pins on the end of the hard drives to master or secondary properly - otherwise you *will* blow up the drives. Trust me

Alex

As a quick word of caution, some raid cards cannot support larger drives without a \"Firmware update\" - kind of like a software update, but for the chips on the card itself. Without this, the card may only \"see\" the larger drives as 80 Gb or whatever.

Another problem is that if you remove one of the disks and then replace it with a larger one, then the raid card will format the new disk to be the same size as the smaller of the two and hide the remaining space. This space then can't be used as the raid cards can usually only support 1 formatted partition per disk.

Best thing to do is probably post here the model of the motherboard you have and of the mirror card as well as the size of drive you are thinking of putting in. We can have a quick check and see if you are going to face any real problems - i'll ask andy to have a read over this as well once he's back in the office on friday and he should be able to give you a quick rundown of the easiest way to do this.

In the office here we're quite lucky and just copy all the data off onto temporary storage and then completely reinstall the computer - it's good for Windows too

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Peter Jarrett, Technical Director
Broadcast Radio Ltd.

Bill Bailey: No win, no fee, no basis in reality. Just a room above a minicab office in Acton and a steady stream of greedy simpletons whose delusion is only matched by their clumsiness

[quote:ea33154294=\"Peter Jarrett\"]Another problem is that if you remove one of the disks and then replace it with a larger one, then the raid card will format the new disk to be the same size as the smaller of the two and hide the remaining space. This space then can't be used as the raid cards can usually only support 1 formatted partition per disk.[/quote]

I think that if you remove the second smaller drive it will then feformat the second disk as its full size and clone the data over before resizing the first disks partition.

The most ideal method would be to use something like Norton Ghost to put the contents of the disk onto another computer over a 100mb/sec link and leave it overnight. But to do that you need a spare computer and a hub!

Alex

Thanks for the comments on my RAID query. I will have to try and find the stuff that came with the PC for details of motherboards / cards, etc.

I had a feeling it wouldn't be plain sailing.

Bob Chadwick
Birch Radio, Rochdale

We have just gone down this line as we had 2 out of the 3 HD's go. We had most things copied to an external drive bought 4 (so we had a hot spare) Seagate Barracuda drives stuck them in and copied the data back across.

One thing that we didn't have on which I would recommend to users they do is some sort of monitoring of your raid array so you can see a message on screen if there are any problems.

I can also thoroughly recommend you have a back-up drive and keep it updated either using robocopy or another copy program.

finally... we are putting the file structure as myriad/audio and myriad/data which we imagined is correct.

cheers

Matt
HR Chelmsford

Matt Wade
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If you are comtemplating upgrading to Myriad v3, have a read of Topic798-22-1.aspx and also Topic796-22-1.aspx

Though definitely only suggestions, might be worth considering

------------
Peter Jarrett, Technical Director
Broadcast Radio Ltd.

Bill Bailey: No win, no fee, no basis in reality. Just a room above a minicab office in Acton and a steady stream of greedy simpletons whose delusion is only matched by their clumsiness