Extending a RAID 1 in Windows 2008
January 31st, 2010
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As I was running out of disk space on my home server, I decided to replace my RAID 1 setup of two Samsung Spinpoint F1 HD103UJ 1TB disks by two Western Digital Caviar Green WD20EARS 2TB disks. As RAID controller I use the onboard ATI/AMD SB600 controller (on a Gigabyte GA-MA69G-S3H motherboard), it does it work perfectly…
Before starting the replacement I searched on the Internet for a good how-to for this replacement as I never extended a soft RAID. Here are the steps I took to get to the extended situation (as there was no complete how-to there for me…):
- Replace one disk with the new disk and have it synchronized (unfortunately, my setup did not show any progress and it took 4.5 hours to complete). This synchronization is done by the OS, in my case Windows 2008. By watching the disk activity light I could tell it was still syncing. After that reboot and make sure the status of the RAID is no longer critical, but functional.
- Replace the second disk with the new disk and have it synchronized as well (think it must have taken the same time….decided to go to bed at this point). After that reboot and make sure the status of the RAID is no longer critical, but functional.
- Press Ctrl + F to get into the RAID utility.
- At this point I had to delete the RAID set and recreate it to get the full size.
- In disk manager the additional disk space was displayed and I was able to have my D drive extended (standard Windows 2008 functionality).