Just looking for ideas on the best and fastest way to upgrade drives in my colo server.
It's a supermicro 1u box with 4 drive slots, It has a 3ware 9650 raid controller in it with 4x 1tb drives in it. I'm running in raid 10 and it's a hardware raid card. It has ubuntu 14.04 LTS on it.
I've ordered 4x 4tb WD enterprise drives to put in it, but since the server only has 4 slots, it's a complete replace, rebuild. I've got about 1.5tb of data on it, moving that won't be fast, but here are my thoughts.
- build duplicate system at home, using
softwarea like hw raid array on the new drives - rsync the data over to temp system
- rsync a copy onto an external drive for another backup
- On the day of the upgrade, use external drive to refresh the rsync from the old drives
- move drives into colo server and make sure the raid card sees the new partitions
- refresh the data onto the new array off of the external
- reboot and celebrate
Yes, the rsync process will take a long time, but I don't mind planning that out, I just don't want to sit at the colo waiting on the 1.5tb to copy, I'd rather refresh the rsync using an external drive that has a copy of the data.
My biggest unknown is if the array uses the same drive format as mdadm on linux, I thought I read that most raid cards use a "standard" format, but I can't find any data to support that with googling.
Thanks for any help!
--edit-- I've ordered another 9650 raid card off of ebay, so that should make the raid array be compatible.
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