Hi mailing list, First, thanks for this great software! I have a RAID5 setup with on 6x 2TB HDD: /dev/md0: Version : 1.2 Creation Time : Tue Oct 19 08:58:41 2010 Raid Level : raid5 Array Size : 9751756800 (9300.00 GiB 9985.80 GB) Used Dev Size : 1950351360 (1860.00 GiB 1997.16 GB) Raid Devices : 6 Total Devices : 6 Persistence : Superblock is persistent Intent Bitmap : Internal Update Time : Tue Apr 12 17:50:25 2011 State : active Active Devices : 6 Working Devices : 6 Failed Devices : 0 Spare Devices : 0 Layout : left-symmetric Chunk Size : 64K Name : ion:0 (local to host ion) UUID : e6595c64:b3ae90b3:f01133ac:3f402d20 Events : 3035979 Number Major Minor RaidDevice State 0 8 81 0 active sync /dev/sdf1 1 8 17 1 active sync /dev/sdb1 4 8 49 2 active sync /dev/sdd1 3 8 33 3 active sync /dev/sdc1 5 8 65 4 active sync /dev/sde1 6 8 97 5 active sync /dev/sdg1 $ cat /proc/mdstat Personalities : [raid6] [raid5] [raid4] md0 : active raid5 sdf1[0] sdg1[6] sde1[5] sdc1[3] sdd1[4] sdb1[1] 9751756800 blocks super 1.2 level 5, 64k chunk, algorithm 2 [6/6] [UUUUUU] bitmap: 1/15 pages [4KB], 65536KB chunk unused devices: <none> I'm approaching over 6.5TB of data, and with an array this large I'd like to migrate to RAID6 for a bit more safety. I'm just checking if I understand this correctly, this is how to do it: * Add a HDD to the array as a hot spare: mdadm --manage /dev/md0 --add /dev/sdh1 * Migrate the array to RAID6: mdadm --grow /dev/md0 --raid-devices 7 --level 6 Cheers, // Mathias -- 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