Hi, On my home server my / partition is a 5-drive RAID6 which doesn't extend to the full extent of the drive. I've now removed everything to the end of the drive (saved to external USB drives for now) and am interested in growing the RAID6 to use all the disk space available. Before I start I've got a couple of questions. Note that I have no storage space issues. I only use about 200GB total on this machine so the new, larger RAID6 will be more than large enough. I do value having RAID6 and being able to lose two drives. 1) Is the fail/remove/partition/add method shown here a reasonable method for my task? https://raid.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Growing 2) The RAID is a 5-drive RAID6 using a 16K chunk size. Would performance be helped significantly using some other chunk size? I am not overly concerned about how long it takes to complete. It seems to me that failing 1 drive in a RAID6 built using 500GB RE3 WD drives is _reasonably_ safe. The drives came from 3 different orders at Amazon spanning about 8 months so I doubt they are from the same manufacturing run. I wouldn't expect each drive grow operation to take more than a few hours, but that's a total guess on my part having done no calculations. Some additional RAID info follows at the end. I could run smartctl testing before starting but it's never shown a problem before. Thanks in advance, Mark c2RAID6 ~ # cat /proc/mdstat Personalities : [linear] [raid0] [raid1] [raid10] [raid6] [raid5] [raid4] md3 : active raid6 sdb3[0] sdf3[5] sde3[3] sdd3[2] sdc3[1] 157305168 blocks super 1.2 level 6, 16k chunk, algorithm 2 [5/5] [UUUUU] unused devices: <none> c2RAID6 ~ # c2RAID6 ~ # mdadm -D /dev/md3 /dev/md3: Version : 1.2 Creation Time : Thu Dec 30 17:40:50 2010 Raid Level : raid6 Array Size : 157305168 (150.02 GiB 161.08 GB) Used Dev Size : 52435056 (50.01 GiB 53.69 GB) Raid Devices : 5 Total Devices : 5 Persistence : Superblock is persistent Update Time : Wed Jun 19 14:33:03 2013 State : active Active Devices : 5 Working Devices : 5 Failed Devices : 0 Spare Devices : 0 Layout : left-symmetric Chunk Size : 16K Name : c2stable:3 UUID : de47f991:86d98467:0637635b:9c6d0591 Events : 22706 Number Major Minor RaidDevice State 0 8 19 0 active sync /dev/sdb3 1 8 35 1 active sync /dev/sdc3 2 8 51 2 active sync /dev/sdd3 3 8 67 3 active sync /dev/sde3 5 8 83 4 active sync /dev/sdf3 c2RAID6 ~ # -- 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
