Last weekend I attempted to change out the hard drives on our server to upgrade storage space. Everything went ok except that backups and provisioning the new drives ended up taking too long to finish so I had to change back to the old drives temporarily. I'm swapping out 3 250 GB drives for 3 1TB drives. The drives contain data and the Exchange DB, the os and all software is on a separate drive.
At this point I just want to make sure everything is going to go smooth this weekend. The plan is to use Symantec Backup Exec to backup the RAID to a different drive, then swap out the hard drives and restore. Last weekend I was able to setup the RAID 5 on the 1TB drives and format the drives the way I wanted so I'm not expecting to have to do that again.
Does anyone have an idea of how long it will take to restore the data? The current drives are full. The backup last weekend took about 15 hours so I'm worried that the restore is going to take a lot longer and I want to make sure everything goes right this time around.
Also if anyone has a better method for swapping the drives I'd like to know. This is the first time I've worked with something like this and I'm kinda worried it won't go as planned.