On Tue, 16 Dec 2008, Redeeman wrote:
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.
Agree here, but the 1.5TiB are not enterprise disks, I would not recommend
moving to them yet, but rather 1TiB, that is what I am currently doing,
moving to WD RE3's (1TiB model).
Justin.
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