Ken Schaefer

At home I have a small virtualised lab running a number of server services. Unfortunately when provisioning my server, I didn't really consider the space needs of the virtualised Windows Home Server. Originally, I bought 2 x 500GB disks for my server, but that doesn't leave much space for the WHS after catering for all the other servers:

With the price of hard drives falling, I purchased an additional 2 x 750 GB disks to add some additional storage. The upgrade plan involved:

1. Purchasing the necessary converter components from Dell to allow adding additional drives to my PowerEdge SC1430 server
2. Shut down all virtual machines. Change settings so that the don't start up when the host machine boots
3. Move the two existing drives to bays 3 and 4. Add the additional drives to bays 1 and 2, and attach to the SAS 5/iR controller. Set the boot order to ensure that the original disks are used to boot.
4. Restart the host machine, and create a new RAID1 array using the two new disks.
5. Once the host OS has started, copy the various virtual machines across to the new RAID 1 array.

The PowerEdge SC1430 prior to the upgrade

Various upgrade components - a couple of new disks, filler face plates (floppy drive and 5.25 bay), and the Dell converter module for the fourth drive bay.

After adding the two new drive. My cabling skills could probably improve :-)

And now, after the upgrade - lots of spare disk space.

Edit: Write throughput on the SAS 5/iR controller seems to be limited to around 400 MB/minute. Is this normal? Or is there something I might need to change in the settings? Using software RAID is around 2.5x more performant...