Dell Open Management System Administration doesn’t work on the PERC 5/i
Dell SAS Storage Manager can’t add drives to an existing array
LSI MegaRAID Storage Mananger is the key
Download here
Command Line Cheat Sheet
Add Drive to existing Array
1. Connect the new drive to the controller. You may connect it while your server is working if you have how swap bays.
2. Open MegaRAID storage manager. You may also do the following procedure from BIOS but I would not recommend that because the procedure may take many hours (10+) and you dont want your server off-line for that long.
3. Click “Logical”
4. Right click on the virtual disc with the 3*1.5TB disks and select Advanced Reconstruction Wizard.
5. Click Add drive
6. Select the new disk and click “Add”.
7. Make sure that the correct RAID level is selected (RAID 0 or RAID 1).
8. Click next (or accept).
I just done this procedure. The perc is reconstructing the array on the fly. I can access my files while it is reconstructing the array.
Configuration backup
If the perc5 dies you have to find another perc5 with the same or newer firmware and the same configuration.
It is highly recommended that you save the configuration on a safe place (usb stick, email, CD-R). You may save the configuration file using MegaRAID storage manager.
I cleared the perc5 configuration once by accident and I was not able to recover the array data because I did not have the configuration file. I was lucky I made that mistake on my personal computer and not on a working server.