Hi all,

We currently have a server with 8 x HDD slots. It is a HP DL380G5 with a P400 controller.

2 x HDD are in a RAID 1+0 config and this hosts the OS.

6 x HDD are in a RAID 5 config and holds an Oracle DB.

Basically the RAID 5 volume is running out of space and we would like to swap all 6 with higher capacity disks.

Excuse my ignorance as I am pretty new to this... I believe we will need to backup the data, delete the RAID volume, insert the new disks, recreate the volume, and restore the data.

2 questions:

1. Do we need to worry about the OS partition or is it completely independent so we can simply take out the 6 and insert 6 new disks and get the controller to recognize the 6 new disks and form a new RAID 5 volume? We should not need to reinstall OS or Oracle correct?
2. Since we are going to restore the data on the volume from another source (our vendor will take care of this) but we would like to keep the existing data on the 6 disks just in case we run into issues and want to fall back, is this possible?

Thanks in advance.