Increasing RAID1 (mirror) redundancy in HP Smart Array P410?

Question

Please is it possible to add a third (or more) drives to a mirror (RAID1) in P410? IIUC it would mean creating "Mirror Group 3" (or more). I could not find any way to add a new mirror group using the HP tool ssacli, the documentation only talks about expanding capacity of the mirror (i.e. adding drives to existing mirror group/s), not about increasing redundancy (i.e. creating new mirror groups). Also google search for "Mirror Group 3" returned no results.

My intention is to add a drive, finish recovery/resync, and eventually to remove one of the old drives, all while running the OS using the ssacli tool. Basically replacing the old drives with new ones while keeping redundancy all the time.

`replacing the old drives with new ones` of the same capacity? Why are you doing that? — Greg Askew, Aug 16 '23 at 11:58
E.g. to use a new drive with a new lifetime. The existing logical drive capacity is more than sufficient for the given use case. Thanks. — Pavel Hofman, Aug 16 '23 at 12:17

score 2 · Answer 1 · answered Aug 16 '23 at 12:15

2

It's not possible. What you can do however is to switch your RAID card into HBA mode and use Linux MDRAID or ZFS three-way mirrors. HP P410 is an "el cheapo" RAID, so software RAIDs would give you better performance either way (+ZFS will provide you with an on-the-fly meta and metadata integrity checks).

answered Aug 16 '23 at 12:15

BaronSamedi1958

13,676
1
21
53

1

Thanks. Do I understand correctly then that the P410 is only capable of 2-drive mirrors? I use MDRAID and ZFS on other servers, but this one is a machine I cannot re-install at will. – Pavel Hofman Aug 16 '23 at 12:18
2

Yes, this is correct. Two-way mirror. – BaronSamedi1958 Aug 16 '23 at 12:25

Increasing RAID1 (mirror) redundancy in HP Smart Array P410?

1 Answers1