We plugged in three additional disk drives on our Dell Poweredge 2950. We want to make them part of the existing, 3-drive virtual drive already on that server. We instructed Dell's OMSA to add just one of the drives to the virtual drive for starters. My research indicated this should be do-able while the system is in use.
It didn't work out that way -- the reconstruct process (set to 30% reconstruct rate) lasted 30 hours during which files and folders would be available for awhile and then suddenly not available. By logging off and logging back on the files/folders would again be available -- but only for awhile, then the log off/on biz again. Each time we logged off we would get a message that explorer.exe was having trouble.
During all this the reconstruct process (under the control of the Perc 5/i controller) would proceed merrily along, undisturbed, it's "percent complete" indicator slowly increasing.
My questions:
1) Does anyone have insight as to why the reconstruct process proved so unbalancing to Windows, regularly breaking our access to files and folders on that server?
2) We want to add the remaining two drives (over the weekend this time !!!). Should we expect the reconstruction process to be even slower if we add *both* remaining drives to the virtual drive at once rather than adding them to the virtual drive one at a time?
3) Anyone know a good heart surgeon?