Brad Campbell wrote: > G'day all, > > I've got 3 arrays here. A 3 drive raid-5, a 10 drive raid-5 and a 15 > drive raid-6. They are all currently 250GB SATA drives. > > I'm contemplating an upgrade to 500GB drives on one or more of the > arrays and wondering the best way to do the physical swap. > > The slow and steady way would be to degrade the array, remove a disk, > add the new disk, lather, rinse, repeat. After which I could use mdadm > --grow. There is the concern of a degraded array here though (and one of > the reasons I'm looking to swap is some of the disks have about 30,000 > hours on the clock and are growing the odd defect). Assuming hotswap and for maximum uptime/minimal exposure to risk... a while back there was a discussion of a fiddly way that involved adding a disk, making a mirror, removing the old disk, breaking the mirror. ( See archive for details) > > I was more wondering about the feasibility of using dd to copy the drive > contents to the larger drives (then I could do 5 at a time) and working > it from there. Err, if you can dd the drives, why can't you create a new array and use xfsdump or equivalent? Is downtime due to copying that bad? David - 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
