2008/12/16 Justin Piszcz <jpiszcz@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>: > > > 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. I think I want 'availability'. I would be really sick to lose the contents, but it wouldn't be the end of the world...I have nowhere big enough for a backup. A 1TiB disk might be a good thing to do a backup while I convert from RAID5 to RAID6, and be useful later in some way. > > 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 I'm not sure what I'm ending up with here - 6x200/RAID5 + 2x200/RAID1 + 200SPARE. Seems a little messy to me... > 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. I guess my main reason is the fear that one will fail at some time (soon); and while it rebuilds another will fail. Seems like I should head for RAID6. I'm not sure I can even do that making and restoring from a backup - can I? Max. -- 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
