# Example: Increasing free space

Create an array with three physical drives. Then, create two logical drives (labeled 1 and 2) in the array such that you have no available free space. The logical drive stripes look similar to the following.

Later, you decide to create another logical drive in the array. First, you must create some free space by adding more physical drives to the array.

If you add two more physical drives to the array, the logical drives migrate such that they are striped across all five drives. The ServeRAID Manager retains the size of the logical drive by decreasing the size of each block on a physical drive. The space in the logical drives does not increase, so there is free space across the bottom portion of each physical drive (labeled 3).

When the operation is complete, use "Create logical drive" to create a new logical drive in the free space.

When increasing free space, you can add up to three physical drives, as long as the sum of the physical drives does not exceed the maximum number of physical drives allowed for the array. The maximum number of physical drives you can have in an array is limited by the controller stripe-unit size.

## More information

- Understanding stripe-unit size
- Understanding creating basic arrays
- Understanding creating logical drives
- Creating logical drives (action)
- Increasing free space (action)

Glossary | Index | Contents

x-1027-SRM-00-00-EN