Here in this article, we will have a talk about how to resize RAID.
And first of all. let us talk about some besic information of RAID. RAID stands for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, which is a technology that employs the simultaneous use of two or more hard disk drives to achieve greater levels of performance, reliability, and/or larger data volume sizes. When several physical disks are set up to use RAID technology, they are said to be in a RAID array which distributes data among several disks. Meanwhile, the array is seen as one single disk by the users and operating system.
RAID is frequently used now. As we all know, RAID is frequently used in Windows Server. When you are looking for a dedicated server for your company, you may select different hardware for it. One of the most important things (especially for database driven websites) is to choose fast and reliable storage system. And RAID is preferred by Windows server users.
RAID makes use of two or more hard drives in order to improve performance, reliability or create larger data volumes. The former is achieved through striping, whereby data is split and written across multiple drives to increase throughput, and reliability can be improved by introducing redundancy. An example of this is a mirrored RAID array, whereby data is written to more than one disk so that in the event of a single disk failure, an exact copy of the original data still remains.
RAID is really used to its full potential in emergency services and Professional where data reliability and performance are essential. Meanwhile, partitioning RAID can maximize its performance as well as optimize the data reliability.
We can simply say that we need to partition RAID to optimize the performance of our servers. A typical example is the partition on the hardware RAID is running out of space. You may want to rebuild the hardware RAID with a larger hard disk. Then, you need to backup the data to another place, rebuild the hardware RAID and restore the data again. But you might lose your valuable data in the process.
So how to avoid data loss? users can use 3rd party partition management software. Here, we take minitool partition wizard as an example. Partition Wizard Server Edition is a professional partition software that allows RAID management without data loss. Through the following steps you can resize RAID in minutes. Insert a new hard disk to the existing hardware RAID and organize this RAID using a RAID controller. Then you can have some unallocated space on this RAID. Suppose you need to extend partition E: on this RAID and there is unallocated space next to it. And then launch Partition Wizard Server Edition and you will see its user interface.
Right click partition E and select Resize/Move. A popped-up dialog box indicates the current size of E: partition. The box also depicts the used and unused space on the partition and the free space surrounding the partition (if any exists), the minimum and maximum sizes that you can resize a partition, as well as the cluster size of the partition. Position the mouse pointer on the right partition handle. When the mouse pointer changes to a double-headed arrow, drag the handle to the partition size you want. Click OK. Don’t forget to apply the changes you’ve made to finalize the resizing operation.
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