Remove physical disk from virtual disk (RAID 0)

Question

I have a few Dell PowerEdge T430 servers each with two physical disks configured as one RAID 0 virtual disk. In the OS the drive is partitioned for /boot and the rest is left for LVM (/home/, /var/, etc).

I need to temporarily move one of the physical disks to another server.

If I resize the LV and VG to fit inside the single physical disk, is it possible to remove the physical disk from the virtual disk (RAID 0) configured in iDrac?

I don't know if it is important but the Controller on the virtual disk is PERC H730 Adapter.

EDIT The question identified as a possible duplicate explains how different RAIDs works. Not if or how you can resize Virtual Disk on Dell PowerEdge server.

Possible duplicate of What are the different widely used RAID levels and when should I consider them? — HBruijn, Dec 19 '18 at 13:22
From the linked duplicate "RAID0* (aka Striping) is sometimes referred to as "the amount of data you will have left when a drive fails .... a single disk failure destroys the entire array"* - in other words, reducing the amount of data so it fits on a single disk does not move the data to that single disk. — HBruijn, Dec 19 '18 at 13:24
How does the linked duplicate relate to my question? I understand the basics of different RAID types. It does not mention if or how you can edit healthy RAID. — badluck, Dec 19 '18 at 13:29

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Dec 19 '18 at 13:29

1

Your best bet will be to externally back up all of your data from the RAID0, then restore once your new vdisk is configured on the other server. There's just no way to shrink a RAID0 once it's set up, at least in a Poweredge (and every other platform I've played with)

answered Dec 19 '18 at 13:29

Mike Texter

93

Is that so uncommon to want to reduce/edit the RAID config? I understand RAID0 is not used in production since it is NOT redundant, but it feels like it beats the purpose of hot-swap, LVM, etc which is designed to make it flexible. – badluck Dec 19 '18 at 13:33
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Maybe with software RAID it would be possible, but with every hardware RAID i've ever set up, there's no shrinking allowed. You can usually grow them dynamically by adding drives, but I can't think of a time where I could shrink one, unless it was a RAID10 or RAID50 or something, I think some controllers or systems will let you reconfigure down to a lower redundancy level. – Mike Texter Dec 19 '18 at 13:37
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hot-swap is meant for raid that offers redundancy or just adding in stand alone drives without having to power down the machine. You can't hotswap in raid0 as that would just break the array – SteamerJ Dec 19 '18 at 20:41

Remove physical disk from virtual disk (RAID 0)

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