Re: Can't expand linear RAID on top of 2 x RAID1

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Stan Hoeppner <stan@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

>On 6/22/2012 5:41 AM, Adam Goryachev wrote:
>> I have expanded my system over time, I started with 2 x 2TB drives in
>> RAID1 (md2)
>> 
>> I then added 2 x 750GB drives, configured as RAID1 (md1)
>> Then created a third raid (md3) as linear with the md2 + md1
>> 
>> Finally, I've upgraded the 2 x 750G to 2 x 1TB drives (one at a
>time).
>> 
>> I then did a mdadm --grow to expand the RAID1 from 750G to 1TB
>> 
>> The problem I am having is that I can't expand the linear (md3) array
>to
>> grow the extra 250G of space.
>> 
>> Could anyone suggest how I might be able to get the extra 250G of
>space
>> to become available?
>
>If you think about this for a few minutes more, and re-read how md
>--linear works, and thus how growing a linear array works, you'll
>surely
>understand why you can't do what you're attempting to do.

Actually, no I don't understand the problem... From my (probably limited) understanding, linear simply appends each drive to the array. I understand that you would not be able to increase the size of any constituent device which is not the last component of the array, but I don't see any reason why it is not possible to increase the size of the last component. (Which is what I am attempting to do)

>As for seeing that extra 250GB, I don't have an answer.  Typically
>linear arrays are used in lieu of growing constituent member arrays.
>That's kinda the whole point of linear (concatenation).

Well, the only other alternative I can think of is to reduce the size of the array back to 750G, reduce the size of the partitions for that array to 750G. Then create a new 250G partition on the two 1TB drives, create a fourth RAID1 array, and then add that 4th RAID1 array to the end of the existing linear array. This just didn't seem like a very good solution (ie, not clean).

>You could try deleting the linear array and simply creating a new one.
>But surely the changed offsets would wreak havoc on the filesystem
>currently spanning this mess.

Perhaps this would work. If I delete the linear array and re-create, with assume-clean (or whatever the right flag is, I'll read the man page later when I'm doing it), then like I said, the first component device will be the same, the second component device is the same, but just happens to be bigger. Any comments on whether this should work?

What should I do to ensure that the component devices are ordered the way I think they are? Apparently the numbers in /proc/mdstat just tell me what order the devices were added, not what order they are in the array?

Thank you for your advice.

Regards,
Adam



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