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I have a Dell PowerEdge R720 with a PERC H710P Mini controller. I currently have 10 disks in a RAID10 array, and I need to expand the array, or create a new virtual disk with 2 new 1.2TB disks I have.

Can I plug the new hard drives into the server without taking it offline? Or is this a bad idea, and should I just wait until we can shut the server down? The drives are Enterprise 10K 1.2TB Dell drives.

Brendan Gooden
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2 Answers2

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This controller is definitely hot-swappable, and the Poweredge R720 comes with caddies to even make this easy. The whole idea of this setup is to be able to hot-swap failing disks.

You can control changes to arrays using a difficult-to-use piece of software called MegaCli (which is available for both Windows and Linux). It may also be useful to know that the PERC controller is made by LSI.

(As an aside most SATA controllers - or at least most ones using an Intel chipset) allow hotswapping are if you are careful - but they are not neccessarily designed to be!)

davidgo
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Yes, you can use Idrac card embedded card if you have it/can use it or Dell OpenManage System Administrator.

It's a dell official tool, windows and Linux compatible (even Debian too which is not listed on official doc).

Krish
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