On 30/03/2011 11:46, Vincent Schut wrote:
Hi all, one of my raid's is currently a raid5 with 4 1TB drives, which I'm going to upgrade by replacing all drives with 2TB drives. Main question: what is recommended: - offline the raid, dd(rescue) each 1TB drive onto a new 2TB one, replace drives, put raid online again or: - manually replace one drive at a time, and let the raid recover and thus write the data onto the new drive? As far as I know all current drives are healthy; regularly SMART monitoring and raid checks have not ringed any bells sofar. I guess offlining and dd-ing would be more secure, but I might miss something and would like to hear other considerations from people more experienced in this area. Regards, Vincent Schut.
If you've got a spare drive slot, and plenty of time, there is another option that lets you keep online and redundant during the process. Re-shape the array to raid 6, while adding one of the new drives. Then you can replace each drive, one at a time, letting the raid recover in between. For the last drive, you just have to remove it then reshape back to raid 5 (although ideally you could buy an extra drive and keep the raid 6 layout - it's worth the cost, assuming you have the drive slot).
Once everything is swapped over, you grow the array to fit the new disks. -- 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
