I have an older system with a Gigabyte motherboard utilizing an AMD SB950 chipset and a Phenom 960T CPU (unlocked to 6 cores). The OS is Windows10. Everything seems to be running fine.
I currently have a RAID 1 array configured on two 1.5 TB physical drives. I want to replace these two drives with 2.0 TB drives and increase the size of the logical drive to 2.0 TB, but I would like to do that without the hassle of doing a complete backup and restore. In other words, I would like RAIDXpert to migrate the data to the new drives and expand the logical drive size to use the full space available on the new physical disks. But I can find nothing documented about how to do this (I do not have open SATA ports to allow me to run both the old physical drives and the new drives at the same time).
I know I can replace an existing RAID 1 physical drive with a larger one and then have RAIDXpert rebuild the array on the new drive. But if I do that, I assume the result would still be the size of the original logical drive, limited by the total space available on the smallest physical drive. So what happens if I then replace the 2nd original 1.5 TB drive with another 2.0 TB drive, so that both physical drives are now 2.0 TB? After I rebuild the array on the new larger drive, will the resulting logical drive still be limited to the original size of 1.5 TB?
If after completing the above steps, I find that the new physical drives have 500 GB of unallocated space, is there an easy way to expand the logical drive to incorporate all the available space on the physical drives? Would it possibly be as easy as just using the existing W10 Disk Management utility to expand the partition? That seems to be just too simple to hope for!
I know I could just try all these things myself and see what happens, but I was hoping to leverage someone else's hard-earned knowledge here before I accidentally screwed the pooch by diving in blindly. And waiting through two RAIDXpert rebuilds just to see what happens might prove to be nothing but wasted time even if I don't screw something up. Perhaps in the end, I should just remove the old drives, configure a new RAID array on the new larger drives, and then just use an external USB dock to copy all the data from one of the original drives?
Thanks in advance for any insight you might be able to give me on this process.
