Keeping service up while taking drive offline in clustered instance I have clustered instance with two (2) data drives on it. Drive J has around 50 databases on it and drive K has about 15. One of the system administrators was trying to increase the size on K by 20 GB and he instead increased it by 200. Now he needs to take the accidental 180 GB back but the drive will need to come offline briefly. Is it possible to take the K drive offline, along with the databases on it, without taking the whole instance down?

I believe it's possible but I'm concerned about the SQL service cluster resource's dependence on the drive in question. Since the drive is setup as a dependence, would I need to remove the dependence first, then take the drive offline without affecting the SQL Server service status?

Thank you.
I've never tried this before but thinking this out logically, these are the things I would do (in no specific order):


To answer your question yes, exclude drive K as a dependency as a cluster resource (this should prevent it from causing the cluster to go down when you need to remove it) 
Manually take those databases offline that are stored on drive K
(I usually set the database to single user mode to make that happen)
Triple-check that nothing else is stored on drive K (like any text log files, etc) that may be used by SQL Server (make sure you dont have any hidden files too)
Take drive offline, rescind the space, then bring it back online