I am (slowly) upgrading some Dell servers. One of these has a H330 PERC controller which is quite slow (no cache, etc.).
So I'm considering upgrading it to a H730P.
It is a secondary server with two 4TB SAS disks in RAID1 configuration.
My question is: is the RAID1 volume scheme compatible with H730? That is, can I just unplug the disks from the one controller and plug them into the other, and have it work?
In other words, are the configurations of H330 and H730 similar enough that "Import Foreign Config" will work on the H730?
I can of course reformat the disk and restore from backup, but the backups are on a NAS and the full restore would probably take about three hours (this is the time required for the full backup on Sundays); and it would need to be done at some awkward time. I would very much like, if possible, to schedule a much shorter break during my normal office hours.
Is it possible? Has someone already done this and are there any issues I should be aware of?
Best Answer
They are both PERC9 serie controllers, so you should be able to simply swap the controllers. After that, your array will be market as "foreign" and you need to import it in the new controller.
Pay big attention to these steps, because a wrong action will cause the array to be deleted. A working backup is a must in this case. Do not attempt a controller migration without it.