Matrix Storage Manager - Upgrade HDD

[idata]

Hello. I have a Dell Precision 390 with Intel Matrix Storage Manager and Raid 1 configuration with 2 300GB drives. I'd like to replace these 2 drives with 1TB drives. Can someone help me with the steps necessary to complete this process? I could not find any documentation in the User's Guide. Thanks.

[idata · Accepted solution]

Hi, Donatello. There is no direct way to upgrade both your hard drives, but you should able to do it indirectly using the below steps.

First - a caveat: the volume size will remain the same. Unless you can expand the volume capacity, the only way to use the additional space would be to create a second volume using that space. Volume capacity expansion is supported on platforms with the Intel(R) ICH10DO controller hub, but I'm not having much luck finding a website that says what controller is in your system. If it doesn't include ICH10DO, you will need to create a second volume to use the additional capacity.

1. Attach one of the 1TB hard drives and mark it as a spare for the RAID 1 volume (open the console, right-click on the new hard drive and click Mark as Spare).
2. Remove an existing 300GB hard drive. Your volume should go degraded (missing hard drive) and a rebuild to the spare drive should begin automatically.
3. Once the rebuild is complete and the volume is normal again, attach the remaining 1TB hard drive and mark it as a spare.
4. Remove the remaining 300GB hard drive. Your volume should go degraded (missing hard drive) and a rebuild to the spare drive should begin automatically. When the rebuild completes, you should be left with a RAID 1 volume that uses both of the 1TB hard drives, but has the same volume capacity as it did originally.

[idata]

Hi Elizabeth, thank you for your prompt response. I have an Intel 82801 HR/GH (IHC7 Family) controller, so I'm guessing that volume capacity expansion will not be supported. Here's an alternate scenario based on your reply -

1) complete your steps 1 & 2 which will give me a 300GB volume on a 1TB drive.

2) remove the remaining 300GB drive

3) use some partition manager software to expand the 300GB volume to 1TB.

4) reboot to see if everything runs (degraded)

5) add the other 1TB and Mark as spare

6) rebuild starts after boot???

Does this sound reasonable? Am I missing anything? Thanks again.

[HERBERT_H_Intel]

although there is a chance that the controller won't give you the remaining 700GB as free space. remember, you only created a 300GB volume on the two HDD before, even if you rebuild twice, the original configuration was a 300GB volume.

If you do manage to create a new volume, the OS will see this as another independent HDD so you won't be able to expand the volume with a parition manager.

I have done similar things using software such as ghost (and similar). it created an image for me and then was able to rewrite the same image but on a larger new volume.

This RAID expansion is normally a feature of Hardware RAID controllers. (it works quite well on LSI/Intel Controllers).

OJ

[idata]

After the first rebuild, I'd be left with a 1TB drive with a 300MB volume and RAID 1 would be running degraded. I was going to reboot not into the OS, but rather to a linux CD and expand the partition from 300MB to 1TB, then reboot into the OS. Will the Intel® Matrix Storage Manager not recognize the drive as having a 1TB partition/volume? Or am I confusion partition with volume when talking about RAID 1?

[idata]

1) complete your steps 1 & 2 which will give me a 300GB volume on a 1TB drive.

2) remove the remaining 300GB drive

3) use some partition manager software to expand the 300GB volume to 1TB.

Unfortunately, this isn't possible.

a) Partition manager software can be used to expand a partition, but not a volume. And you're correct - volume capacity expansion is not available on ICH7R.

b) After completing steps 1 & 2, your volume will include 1x300GB hard drive and 1x1TB hard drive. Even if the 300GB hard drive is missing from the system, it is still part of the volume so -- even if volume capacity expansion was available on ICH7R, you would not be able to expand the volume to 1TB until the volume included 2x1TB drives. Think about it from the software's persective. It doesn't know that you aren't planning to add back the 300GB hard drive so it would be letting you make major changes to a volume when it's not healthy (degraded) and only half of it is present - changes that would render the other half useless when it returned.

Does that help?

fyi -- You should be able to take advantage of the extra space by creating a second volume; it's just that you can't expand your original volume to fill all the space.

[HERBERT_H_Intel]

sometimes it can be confusing as RAID and volume can be interchanged sometimes.

so you have a raid 1. you originally had 600GB of RAW space between the two HDD and in that space you used 300GB of each drive to create a raid 1.

But lets say that you didn't want to use the entire space for RAID 1. you could have used 150GB of each drive to create a 150GB RAID 1 and still have space left, then you could have created another RAID 1 of 150 GB. Or you even could have created a RAID 0 with 300GB with the remaining space. Thats one of the reasons why its called Matrix RAID. each one of these RAID are seen as an entirely new HDD in the OS.

When you finish all the rebuilding you will have 2 1TB drives but 300gb on each drives for the original RAID 1. i don't think tha matrix raid has the option to expand that. I'm quite certain that you will be able to create an NEW RAID volume but that will be seen as a different disk in the OS and you won't be able to expand the original 300GB in the other volume you created.

OJ

[idata]

Elizabeth/OJ, thank you very much for all of your input. I now have both a solution to my problem and a better understanding of RAID 1 and how it is implemented with Intel Matrix Storage Manager.

[idata]

yay! I'm glad you found a solution.

[idata]

Please help with my stupid disaster! I just added a 1T HDD to my existing (with OS, everything) 1T drive with an aim of setting up a RAID 1. Got into the Intel Matrix Storage ROM Utility *Ctrl I), and create the RAID Volume. I read the Help in Intet's Install forum which said this is possible. But when I was given no choice, I thought it'd just erase the emply new HDD, but :-(, my original 1T drive with OS and all data is now lost. PLEASE help me to recover them if at all possible. Just 1 sec of ignorance, so regretful. Many thanks in advance.

[idata]

Calvin, I don't know how to fix your problem, but if you want answers, you should start up a brand new post with your problem.

[idata]

Hi,

So happy to have found this post. I am in a very similar situation. My 2 320Gb drives that are in a RAID1 array together (using Intel motherboard & Windows storage manager software) are getting full (~65 Gb left). Drives of 1 Tb and even 2 Tb are really cheap now so I want to replace the smaller drives. Elizabeth et al., I looked up the http://www.intel.com/Assets/PDF/prodbrief/dg45id_product_brief.pdf product brief for my motherboard and it indicates I do have ICH10. The Windows 7 driver says it's for 8/9/10 but I assume the product brief is correct.

I understand the instructions you previously gave. What are the remaining steps to "grow" the volume to occupy the entirety of the new drive array, once I have both larger drives up and running?

Thanks.

[idata]

Thought I would report back. I plowed ahead on my own today and everything worked amazingly well! I was very impressed by how the Windows software was able to make changes to the array. I didn't have to do anything at the BIOS level. I backed up everything first to be safe, shut down, detached one of the old drives, attached one new one in its place, booted, and the Intel storage manager BIOS screen noted that the array was "degraded" but it let me boot anyway.

Windows 7 detected a new type of drive, installed it, and had me reboot.

On the second reboot, I went into the Intel Windows storage manager app. It was a simple matter to right click on the new drive and rebuild the array to that drive, which automatically added that drive to the array. Absolutely no confusion and it all went smoothly. Took a couple of hours, of course. I then shut down again, pulled out the other old drive, and went through the process again (including having to reboot to install the Windows driver for the second drive).

Once that was done, it was very easy to use the Intel Windows storage manager app again to grow the volume to fill all of the available space, since my motherboard has ICH10. The app did a great job of graphically representing what it was doing so there was no confusion. This took a couple of hours but the computer was usable during that time. I then rebooted and went to Windows Disk Manager. It saw all of the available empty space and let me add that to the C: volume. Only took a few seconds and no reboot was required. Hooray!

Overall, I was very impressed. Good job, Intel. I now have 3x the hard drive space (320 GB --> 1 Tb) and it only cost $140 for two new drives (no tax, no shipping). Super value.

--Kent

[idata]

Hi Elizabeth

Why do I need to first attach one of the new drives and mark it as spare.

Won't it work when I just remove one of the existing drives and replace it with one of the new and bigger ones?

Thank you for your answer

Ulrich

[idata]

yes .. but when you remove a hard drive and replace it with the new drive, you need to tell the software that you want to rebuild to that drive; it won't do so automatically.

so - in order to start the rebuild to the new, larger drive, you either need to mark it as a spare, or select "rebuild to this hard drive" in the console app (right-click on the new hard drive - should appear under Non-RAID drives in the device tree). I just listed the first one because it's shorter to type.

does that help explain?

[idata]

yes, thank you.

I was just wondering how to do it because in my Dell XPS 420 there are only 2 internal disk slots, currently equipped with 2 Seagate 500GB disks configured as Raid 1. And I would like to upgrade to 2 1TB Disks.

Kind Regards

Ulrich

[MBenc2]

Hi Donatello,

I understand that the reason to insert 2x1GB HDD in you PC is to enlarge also the capacity.

I had the same problem and solve it with standard MS tool/Feature as following:

- Start the CMD as Administrator and follow the instruction from http://support.microsoft.com/kb/325590/en-us http://support.microsoft.com/kb/325590/en-us

The name of the standard programm is " diskpart.exe "

Note: The only parameter you need to extend to the full capacity is "noerr"

You can see the change by starting " %SystemRoot%\system32\compmgmt.msc /s " (System Management Console) as administrator, don't need to reboot, don't loose data and it take a couple of seconds. You can also see the change in OS-explorer by clicking your drive (e.g. C:\) right mouse and choise properities.

Tell me please the results.

Bye

[idata]

Arny006, that is an interesting solutionl, however, I'm hesitant to test it on a production box. My capacity issues were primarily due to storing database backups. So instead of upgrading the array, i've just put the 2 x 1TB in the box as separate/individual non-raid drives. My database backup program copies the production database from the raid array to one of the new drives and then makes a separate duplicate copy to the other new drive (a third program backs up the data offsite). So I've got the raid array with the OS and production database, 2 independent HDDs with daily backup data. I like it better this way - if i build a new production box, i can just carry my 2 backup HDDs to the new box and avoid raid complications. That said, the raid is fine for the production OS and DB datastore.

[idata]

Em, sorry if I miss something here but doesnt ICH7 support RAID5? This means at least 3 drives.

So you have 300+300 in RAID1.

a) Attach the 1T drive

b) Use a cloning tool available at several manufacturer sites and clone the 300G partition onto the 1T disk

c) Break/remove the old raid drives

d) Attach the new 1T and create new array from existing hard drive (auto-rebuild here)

e) Use a 3rd party tool to expand the partition.

Several tools, like Acronis', Norton's and Powerquest's can clone a drive/partition AND expand the new partition at the same time.

I know this is an older topic, but, wouldn't that work just fine?