Jonathan Gazeley wrote:
Dear all,
This is hopefully a simple question for you to answer, but I am fairly
new to RAID and don't want to risk losing my data!
My setup is as follows:
- I have four 500GB disks. Each disk is split into a 5GB partition,
and a 495GB partition.
- The four 5GB partitions are in a RAID-5 array, md0. CentOS is
installed on this 15GB partition.
- The four 495GB partiions are in a RAID-5 array, md1. This partition
holds my user data.
However, I have decided I no longer wish to two arrays across the
disks. I've added a fifth disk on which I have installed the OS
without RAID, meaning the old md0 is currently unused. Can I simply
remove the four 5GB partitions, and resize the four 495GB partitions
to fill the entire disk? Will this break anything?
Not unless you make a mistake in typing, or your hardware or power fails
during the process. Of course in that case you will possibly lose
everything.
Before anybody tells me off for having the OS on a non-RAID disk, this
is a home server and therefore high availability is not an issue. But
keeping my data safe against disk failures is important to me.
Having your o/s and swap on RAID reduces your chances of losing your
data. If it were me and reliability were the goal, I would have the o/s
mirrored on the first two drives (as seen by the BIOS) so you boot if
one fails hard, then put swap RAID-10 in the little 5GB partition on the
other three drives, then convert the raid-5 to raid-6 using the rest of
the added fifth drive.
Anything which reduces the chances of an unclean shutdown improves the
chances of keeping your data. A decent UPS is a big help in that regard.
Disk failures on the data drives are not the only threat to your data!
--
bill davidsen <davidsen@xxxxxxx>
CTO TMR Associates, Inc
Doing interesting things with small computers since 1979
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