[Info-vax] Raid 5 Add Disk to Raid 5 with p400 and MSA$UTIL

[Neil Rieck]

On Wednesday, April 5, 2023 at 7:55:19 AM UTC-4, Kenneth Randell wrote:
> On Tuesday, April 4, 2023 at 5:21:35 PM UTC-4, Russell Allred wrote: 
> > I have 3 300Gb SAS drives running raid 5. It's almost out of space. I have added a new matching drive I can see with the MSA$UTIL show options. The new drive is disk 4. Can I add it to the existing RAID 5 without hurting the data and get more free blocks? I do not know how this works. 2. The firmware on the new drive is HPD2. On the older ones it HPD5. Will that matter? 3. My cache battery is dead can I safely work on these drives? Here is what I see in MSA: 
> >
> The answer to question 2 - I've never seen disk firmware in a p4x0 controller make any difference operationally

>From OpenVMS it is possible to create a larger new RAID-based volume then copy to it provided you have spare slots.
If the volume you want to enlarge contains system software then you will be rebooting (obviously)
If the volume you want to enlarge does not contain system software then it is a  little easier (you will still need to stop processes on a user volume, dismount the old volume, mount the new volume then continue.)

https://neilrieck.net/docs/openvms_notes_itanium_diary.html#reconfig2600
https://neilrieck.net/docs/openvms_notes_itanium_diary.html#reconfig2800

Some of these steps are available from ROM (ORCA) during boot but I suspect you would need to bring your system up in conversational mode in order to copy from old to new then reboot again.

comment: On both my rx2600 and rx2800 systems I am doing weekly backups of both my system disk and user disk (I pull those destination drives every month to move them off site). I see no reason why I couldn't reconfig those destinations with larger drives, do a backup to them, then boot the new system disk.

Neil Rieck
Waterloo, Ontario, Canada.
http://neilrieck.net