On Tue, 16 Dec 2008, Max Waterman wrote:
Hi, I have a 8x200GB RAID5 array - 4 SATA and 4 EIDE. It has 2 spare, so that's only 6 drives actually in the array, making 1TB of space (I think that's right). The drives are quite old now, and people are asking what I want for Christmas...so I'm wondering how to upgrade this setup. Clearly I don't want to retire my existing drives prematurely, since they've shown no sign of problem. My initial thought was to make a RAID1 out of a new 1TB disk and my existing RAID5 array, but perhaps that doesn't make much sense... Perhaps I could get a 400GB drive (or more likely 500GB) and make a RAID1 with a couple of the existing 200GBs? ...but I'm just guessing and the purpose of this email is to get advice. What do you guys think? Max.
Tough call, depends on what you want to accomplish? Availability or mass storage space? You could continue running like you are now and use a 1TiB disk as your "scratch" area and rsync the important data off to your RAID-5 nightly for example.
Another option (probably not a good one) take two of your 200s and make a RAID1, leave your RAID-5 as-is, buy another 200GiB as a spare and then with the rest of the $ buy something else, there are no good alternatives, those are pretty old disks you got there, but I agree if its been running fine, no reason to replace it.
Justin. -- 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
