All this discussion has led me to wonder if we users of linux RAID have a clear consensus of what our priorities are, ie what are the things we really want to see soon as opposed to the many things that would be nice but not worth delaying the important things for. FWIW, here are mine, in order although the first two are roughly equal priority. 1 "Warm swap" - replacing drives without taking down the array but maybe having to type in a few commands. Presumably a sata or sata/raid interface issue. (True hot swap is nice but not worth delaying warm- swap.) 2 Adding new disks to arrays. Allows incremental upgrades and to take advantage of the hard disk equivalent of Moore's law. 3. RAID level conversion (1 to 5, 5 to 6, with single-disk to RAID 1 a lower priority). 4. Uneven disk sizes, eg adding a 400GB disk to a 2x200GB mirror to create a 400GB mirror. Together with 2 and 3, allows me to continuously expand a disk array. (Not knowing the code, I wonder if 2, 3 and 4 could be accomplished by allowing an "external" RAID device to have several internal devices and with changes accomplished the old one to shrink and the new one to grow until the old one no longer exists.) Thanks for listening. John - 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
