Why would you ever want to reduce the size of a raid5 in this way?
A feature that would have been useful to me a few times is the ability to shrink an array by whole disks. Example: 8x 300 GB disks -> 2100 GB raw capacity shrink file system, remove 2 disks = 6x 300 GB disks --> 1500 GB raw capacity Why? If you're not backed up by a company budget, moving data to an new array (extra / larger disks) is extremely difficult. A lot of cases will hold 8 disks but not 16, never mind the extra RAID controller. Building another temporary server and moving the data via Gigabit is slow and expensive as well. Shrinking the array step-by-step and unloading data onto a regular filesystem on the freed disks would be a cheap (if time consuming) way to migrate, because the data could be copied back to the new array a disk at a time. Thanks, C. - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-raid" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
