I have quite a dilemma. And have searched, but havent found quite what I was looking for. I have a series of servers that are essentially logging and controlling medical information. The one I'm concerned about cannot be taken offline for medical reasons. However, the hard drives are reaching their memory limit. There are a couple of slots left for new drives. Is it at ALL possible to add two hard drives in a raid configuration and enable them WITHOUT shutting the server down? Here are some details:

Dell PE2970 w/ SLES 10.3 (x86_64)
16 MB Ram
6 core opteron 2431
dual 160 GB sata drives Raid so = 4 slots

Thanks for any help. Most anything I've everthing I've needed to know I've found here. Time to join up

The SATA and SAS standards (and consequently all drives and connectors) both support hotplugging, the question is if your controller (and its driver) does.

According to the manual, the PowerEdge 2970 supports "Up to eight 2.5-inch, hot-plug SAS or SATA internal drives".

So the answer is that you can go right ahead and insert new drives. Once you've done that, you'll need to configure the RAID controller to either add the drives to an existing RAID set, or create a new set. The drives should then be visible from the OS, and you can extend partitions/add space to LVM/partition a new drive/whatever, depending on the drive configuration.

I work for Dell and wanted to add some information to Ser Olmy's advice (which was certainly correct -- thank you!). It does support both SAS and SATA however the two types cannot be mixed in a single array -- this is a limitation of Dell PERC and SAS controllers. If you have a 3rd party controller it may not apply. The system does have a hot-swap backplane option though it may have been purchased in a cabled configuration in which case you have no choice but to power down to install the drives. SLES is supported by Dell -- in order to create an array online without rebooting you'll need to install Dell OpenManage Server Administrator from http://linux.dell.com/wiki/index.php...OMSA#Rug_setup and start the services, then you can create an array using the "omconfig storage controller action=createvdisk" command with appropriate parameters as documented at http://support.dell.com/support/edoc....htm#wp1134551. If you want to give that a shot let us know how it goes or if you have any trouble.