I am curious if there are plans for either of the following; -RAID6 reshape -RAID5 to RAID6 migration Here is why I ask, and sorry for the length. I have an aging RAID6 with eight 250G drives as a physical volume in a volume group. It is at about 80% capacity. I have had a couple drives fail and replaced them with 500G drives. I plan to migrate the rest over time as they drop out. However this could be months or years. I could just be patient and wait until I have replaced all the drives and use the -G -z max to grow the RAID to resize the array to the maximum space. But I could use the extra space sooner. Since I already have the existing RAID (md0) as a physical volume in a volume group, I though why not just use the other half of the drives and create another RAID6 (md1) add that to the same volume group and so on as I grow. md0 made from devices=/dev/sd[abcdefgh]1; md1 made from devices=/dev/sd[abcdefgh]2; and so on (I could have the md number match the partition number for aesthetics I suppose)... By doing this I further protect myself from possible bit error rate on increasingly large drives. So if there are suddenly three bit errors I have a chance as long as they are not all on the same partition number. Mdadm will only kick out the bad partitions and not the whole drive. (I know I am already doing RAID6, what are the chances of three!). To get to my point, I would like to split the new half of the drives into a new physical volume and would 'like' to try to start using some of the drives before I have replace all the existing 250G drives. If RAID6 reshape was an option I could start once I have replaced at least three of the old drives (built it as a RAID6 with one missing). But it is not available, yet. Or, since RAID5 reshape is an option, I could again start when I have replaced three (built it as a RAID5) than grow it to until I get to the eighth drive and migrate to the final desired RAID6. But that is not an option, yet. Thoughts? - 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
