We had an old server that we use to monitor some types of network traffic. The database was stored locally on a sole drive that was 80Gb in size.
While this box is not critical and we can’t move it to our virtualized infrastructure, the drive was at 99.8% capacity and data read/writes were starting to fail.
Our two goals were to increase drive space and add redundancy to the machine.
All this for $200
This will pretty much work on any Windows setup, and I’m sure there are parallel tools on other OS’s (a friend told me this was built into Mac OS with an external drive setup).
There are two free tools you’ll need: Clonezilla and Partition Master.
We purchased two 1Tb drives for the upgrade, each about $100.
The steps we used to complete the upgrade are as follows:
- install the 1Tb drive, stick in the Clonezilla CD and reboot the server (make sure it boots to CD in the BIOS)
- use Clonezilla to move an image of the 80Gb drive to the 1Tb drive
- remove the 80Gb drive and reboot the machine
- in drive management, confirm that the extra space is available (that the OS sees the new drive space)
- run Partition Master in Windows and extend the partition to the entire disk
- shut down the machine
- install the second 1Tb drive
- reboot, then mirror the drives in drive management
This was dead-simple, cost us about $200 and took about 20 minutes of work. The total project, counting wait times for cloning (2 hours), partition adjustments (40 mins) and mirroring (5 hours) was less than a day.
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