On Tue, 2008-12-16 at 06:44 -0500, Justin Piszcz wrote: > > 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. Hehe, i myself am in a somewhat similar position.. i have a 6x300gb raid5 array.. And the disks appears perfectly fine through smart etc, but on the other hand, a SINGLE new disk today can present me with the same level of usable capacity very cheap, and ill bet using considerably less power. Thus i have chosen to very soon retire this setup, and make a replacement 8x1tb or 6x1.5tb raid6 for increased capacity and safety :) i'd recommend you work towards deprecating LOTS of drives in favor of fewer bigger newer, and keep the old ones around as an archive/backup thing. > > 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 -- 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
