Raid 1 upgrade to larger size

[swat9uk]

need some advice here on Raid 1

I run os on its own C drive,
then I have disk 1 500gb
disk 2 500gb

I have disk 1 and disk 2 mirrored in raid 1 configuration via windows 8 setup
I want to know if I wanted to upgrade these two drives 1 & 2 lets say to 1tb drives,
can I power off-unclip disk 2 insert 1tb disk power backup and will it rebuild it, ect then once its rebuilt and sent data over to new 1tb disk repeat the same process with disk 1, or is that just to easy?

I looked into it further more and it said you could just use a raid cloning software instead, without breaking mirror or loosing any data in the process, I prefer my first idea myself

what are your thoughts on this , any data loss is not an option for me
and really could do with something easy without a long process to reduce the downtime

 

[USAFRet]

Assuming this is a desktop and you have sufficient SATA ports:
Why not just install the two new larger drives, build the RAID 1 array with those, and just copy that data over.

Instead of rebuilding it twice with different size drives, etc.

 

[Paperdoc]

USAFRet has a better idea.

What you propose probably will NOT work. If you replace one 500 GB unit in a RAID array with a 1TB unit the RAID system should be able to rebuild itself by copying everything from the old 500 to the new 1TB. HOWEVER, to do that it will create on the new HDD unit a Partition to match the original still-good RAID unit - in other words, 500 GB also. The other half of your new drive will not be used. When you do your proposed second step - replace the remaining 500 GB with another new 1TB - it will do the same thing. You will end up with a 500 GB RAID1 array that half-uses each of its HDD units, and the other halves will be wasted!

 

[drtweak]

I third the motion of USAFRet.

If you DON"T have enough SATA ports, yank one of the mirrored drives, install the other two, make the RAID 1, and clone over the one drive in there.

OR

If you still don't have enough SATA ports you can

unplug your existing RAID 1, plug in new drives and make a RAID 1, then plug in one of each drive, clone 500 GB to 1TB, remove 500 GB and connect 1TB, and it could then rebuild. Then just go into Disk managment and expand the volume.