User manual

RAIDXpert User Manual
106
You can add physical drives to an existing logical drive while keeping the same
RAID level for:
•RAID 0
•RAID 5
•JBOD
RAIDXpert supports up to six physical drives for these logical drives.
Ranges of Logical Drive Migration
There are limitations to how large you can expand a logical drive, depending on
the size of your current logical drive.
The Windows 2000 and Windows XP (32-bit) operating systems support a
10-byte LBA format. This means that a logical drive can have up to 4 billion
address blocks or sectors. This limitation does not apply to Windows XP (64-bit),
2003 Server, Vista, and Linux OSes with the 2.6 kernel.
For Windows 2000 and Windows XP (32-bit), multiply the number of blocks by
the sector size to find the capacity of a logical drive:
4,000,000,000 blocks x 512 bytes per sector = 2,048,000,000,000 bytes
of data for a 2TB drive.
Note that you cannot change the size of the sectors nor can you increase the
number of address blocks above 4 billion.
As a result, there are range limits imposed upon logical drive migration as shown
in the table above.
Important
• The Target logical drive may require more physical drives
than the Source logical drive
• Add physical drives that are the same size or larger than
those in the current logical drive.
• If the Target logical drive requires an EVEN number of
physical drives but the Source logical drive has an ODD
number, ADD a physical drive as part of the migration process
• You cannot reduce the number of physical drives in your
logical drive
• You cannot migrate a logical drive when it is Critical or
performing activities such as Synchronizing or Rebuilding
• You cannot migrate a JBOD to a RAID or a RAID to a JBOD.
But you can migrate a RAID Ready to a JBOD