I know you don't want to throw hardware at the problem, but if your data now fits in 4TB, I'd recommend that you buy a 4TB drive, put LUKS on it, copy the data to it, reconfigure your 12TB RAID5, move the data back to the RAID, and then return the drive, paying the restocking fee. Or sell it privately. Unless your time is free and your data is valueless, this seems the most straightforward way to solve the problem. Note that you need not wipe the returned drive, since you put LUKS on it first, though if you want to be super-paranoid, wipe the first few megabytes of it before return. If you don't trust having your data on a single drive during the process, buy two 4TB drives and copy twice. Don't make them a RAID; that just makes everything more complicated and more prone to failure or mistakes. Just make two copies and leave one copy on the shelf while you copy back over your 12TB RAID. Or, if you have backups of your RAID already (you -do- have backups, right? else you shouldn't be considering your data safe even when you're -not- monkeying with the RAID), then maybe a single 4TB copy is enough, assuming that you have checked that your backups are actually backups and not something you can't read or perhaps something that was never written. And if you didn't have backups, then keep the drive(s), and now you do. Since it's a RAID5, you -could- live more dangerously and fail enough drive(s) to get 4TB of free drives out of it instead of buying new drive(s), and then re-add the drive(s) when everything's done. But this raises the chances that something will go wrong and leave you with a smoking crater instead of your data. P.S. And next time, don't scrimp on "wasting" a disk sector to avoid having a partition table. Don't even worry about "wasting" a possible megabyte (default alignment) at the start of each partition. Your 12TB RAID will never notice. And this way, certain other software (like installers) are less likely to believe that the disk is blank and write something unfortunate to it, like a partition table in the middle of your RAID or LUKS headers. _______________________________________________ dm-crypt mailing list dm-crypt@xxxxxxxx http://www.saout.de/mailman/listinfo/dm-crypt
