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Expanding C Drive on Windows 2003


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Greetings.

Windows Server 2003 Enterprise x86 w/SP2

Currently built using 2 x 73GB drives RAID1.

Customer wants to add 4 73GB drives and expand C drive to fill entire space.

Can diskpart do this?

Any advise greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

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No ... and having a single 400 Gig C: partition on a server is an insane recipe for disaster. It will stay in a constant state of badly fregmented because everything is doing read/writes to the same partition.

I once saw a badly deployed Exchange server that had gotten turned into an open-relay overflow a 200 Gig drive overnight. Being it was the clients only server DC/inventory/Accounting they were completely hosed until we had time to respond for the rescue.

Applications/Services/User files should be isolated by partition and all log files should be pushed to a small partition where they can fragment till hell won't have it (because that is their nature...). It'll make the server happier, and the Admin happier as it's much easier to figure out who or what is eating space and why.

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Without damaging the system partition, no. There are 3rd party applications that can do this, but your best bet would be to image the server as a backup, delete and recreate the RAID with the new drives (assuming it's the same controller, drivers won't be an issue) and restore the image on the new array.

And I have to agree with the previous poster, any boot volume larger than 40GB or so is a recipe for disaster long-term. With 6 74GB drives, I would say that a boot volume of 40 or so GB and partitioning the rest to hold things like applications, profiles, and other data storage is a much better idea.

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Thanks to both the people who replied...much appreciated.

You brought up some great points that I will use to shoot down their request.

I will be either creating a D drive for them, or rebuilding the affected servers.

Cheers!

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I'm in agreement here as well. Personally I would opt for just adding the drives as another array instead of partitioning. If the controller is multichannel put them on another channel for another performance boost. However, putting them on another channel may not be an option if the server has a backplane (unless it's a split backplane).

Generally when I do new servers I create a RAID1 array for the OS and another array (RAID5 or RAID10 depending on drives and controller capabilities) for data/storage. I tend split the drive I/O up as much as possible. It also adds another layer to the drive redundancy.

Edited by nmX.Memnoch
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I found out more info...

Rebuilding the server is an option now as well if thats the best route.

The 2 existing drives are 74GB 10K RPM, RAID1

The 4 new drives are 74GB 15K RPM

If I create another array and extended partition (D drive), would you think the new drives can run at 15K RPM?

If it helps, its an IBM x3850.

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I must say i agree with nmX.Memnoch. This is what i do with most of the servers i manage. Two drivers in raid 1 for the os and then the rest in raid 5 for storage. If anything happens you just need to swap the bad disk with a good one and the array will rebuild itself. Also on top of that i usually have a tape drive backup system so backups can be taken off site in case of fire/flood/etc.

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If I create another array and extended partition (D drive), would you think the new drives can run at 15K RPM?

Well...creating a new array would be a new drive to the OS. So you wouldn't be creating an extended partition.

And yes, the new drives will run at 15K RPM regardless of the existing drives. That's a spindle speed and cannot be changed.

Before you create the array you need to find out what they anticipate their storage needs would be. The reason I say that is it'll be a deciding factor in what type of array you would create. RAID10 will give you the best performance (and potentially redundancy), but you lose half the drive space. For instance, four 73GB drives in RAID10 would be ~146GB. But in RAID5 that would be ~219GB. If space isn't a concern I would opt for RAID10...but that's just me.

Edited by nmX.Memnoch
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