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I have 4 disks RAID5 array and want to add additional identical disks in order to expand the capacity. I do everything as instructed, but "expand/migrate" buttons are greyed out, so i cannot do it.

Mike Reznikov
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In order to do an expand, Adaptec recommends to use the latest Firmware on the RAID controller, check that consistency check is disabled and to initialize the disks you want to add to your RAID array. You can find in this document more details about this process.

Always have an updated full backup of your information, independently the size of it. This is the most basic action you can do to protect it.

Jesus Huesca
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If there are partitions on the HDD, it cannot be initialized or added to an array. The entire HDD must be unallocated.

If this is your situation, remove any partitions and try again.

CWolf
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You can't do this without first backing up your data, destroying the array, adding the new drive, and then re-creating the array.

Bert
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  • But Adaptec claim, that this card is able to perform "online capacity expanding", there is a button to do it. Mine is grayed out and i do not understand why. And i can not to back up, to much data. – Mike Reznikov Mar 24 '21 at 12:47
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It is possible to expand the RAID-5 array from (4) drives to (5). I did this a few years back with my Adaptec 71605, going from (4) 8TB drives to (5) 8TB drives, staying with RAID-5. I had the same issue (greyed out in GUI) so used the command line instead of using their ARCCONF utility. It took about a month to expand, but the availability and performance during that period were OK. This goes some way to explaining why they greyed it out! For best results, always be sure to disable the write cache on the drives (relying on RAM/SLC/BBU on the controller instead in case of power outages). Even better if you have a large UPS.

Command I Used:

arcconf modify 1 FROM 0 TO MAX 5 0 0 0 1 0 2 0 3 0 4

Explanation:

arcconf (utility) modify (command) 1 (controller) FROM 0 (logical drive) TO (modifications to follow) MAX (use max size available for expansion) 5 (keep as RAID-5) 0 0 (Drive #1, Channel 0, SCSI Device ID 0) 0 1 (Drive #2, Channel 0, SCSI Device ID 1) 0 2 (Drive #3, Channel 0, SCSI Device ID 2) 0 3 (Drive #4, Channel 0, SCSI Device ID 3) 0 4 (Drive #5, Channel 0, SCSI Device ID 4)

Resources:

https://ask.adaptec.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/15162/~/how-to-expand%2Fmodify-an-existing-raid-array-using-arcconf%3F

https://storage.microsemi.com/en-us/support/infocenter/release-2014-1/index.jsp?topic=/adaptec_cli.xml/Topics/arcconf_modify.html

Derek
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