How to extend RAID to enlarge its storage capability?

Have you experienced the partition on the hardware RAID is running out of space? You may want to rebuild the hardware RAID with a larger hard disk to extend the hardware RAID. Then, you need to backup the data to another place, rebuild the hardware RAID and restore the data again. What a time-consuming task! And you might lose your valued data in this process.

Is it possible to extend RAID in a safe and easy way? The answer is yes and this article will introduce a great solution to partition RAID without data loss.

What is RAID?

Redundancy is achieved by either writing the same data to multiple drives, or writing extra data across the array, calculated such that the failure of one disks in the array will not result in loss of data. A failed disk may be replaced by a new one, and the lost data reconstructed from the remaining data and the parity data.

There are various combinations of these approaches giving different trade-offs of protection against data loss, capacity, and speed. RAID levels 0, 1, and 5 are the most popular.

• RAID 0 (striped disks) distributes data across several disks in a way that gives improved speed at any given instant. If one disk fails, however, all of the data on the array will be lost, as there is neither parity nor mirroring.
• RAID 1 mirrors the contents of the disks, making a form of 1:1 ratio real-time backup. The contents of each disk in the array are identical to that of every other disk in the array.
• RAID 5 (striped disks with parity) combines three or more disks in a way that protects data against loss of any one disk. The storage capacity of the array is reduced by one disk.

Which is the best way to extend the hardware RAID?

Whether it is possible to extend RAID arrays? Whether the RAID controller supports doing so or not? By the way, a hardware implementation of RAID requires at least a special-purpose RAID controller. You may use the tools from the manufacturer of your RAID controller to reconfigure the array. Only with that RAID controller, can you are able to Partition RAID. Why not use the software to ease the process?

Taking easy operation and data security into consideration, you need a reliable third-party RAID partitioning tool. Compatible with all levels of hardware RAID, EaseUS Partition Master Server Edition can help you extend/partition/resize RAID or boot RAID on Windows Server 2000/2003/2008 and Non-Server Windows 2000/XP/Vista/Windows 7 32 and 64 bit systems.

Now, we'd like to talk about how to extend the hardware RAID, use reliable RAID partition software to extend the hardware RAID which is out of space without any data loss.

Firstly, insert a new hard disk to the existing hardware RAID and organize this RAID using RAID controller. Then there is some unallocated space on this RAID.

The following step is to launch EaseUS Partition Master Server Edition and use its built-in resize and move function to extend this RAID with the unallocated space.

1. Launch EaseUS Partition Master Server Edition.

2. Select the partition you want to extend, right click it and select "Resize/Move partition", drag the partition handle rightwards to extend partition.

3. Click Apply.

Free download EaseUS Partition Master Server Edition to partition RAID on your server computer.

 

 

Related Articles:

• How to Resize a Raid Partition?
• Dynamic Disk Copy/Clone to Backup or Replace or Resize Dynamic Disk
• Easiest and Safest Solution to Repartition RAID 5 on Windows Server
• Free Partition Software
• Partition RAID 5 in Windows Server 2003

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