Jeff> Hi all I’ve had a poke around but am yet to find something Jeff> definitive. I have a raid 5 array of 4 disks amounting to Jeff> approx 5.5tb. Now this disks are getting a bit long in the tooth Jeff> so before I get into problems I’ve bought 4 new disks to replace Jeff> them. Can I suggest that you buy another disk and convert into a RAID6 setup for even more resiliency? Esp with that much data (great that you have backups!) the piece of mind of an extra disk is well worth the cost in my mind. Personally, I just go with RAID1 mirrors on large disks like this for my home system. I don't have *that* much stuff... though my disks too are getting long in tooth. Jeff> I have a backup so if it all goes west I’m covered. So I’m Jeff> looking for suggestions. Jeff> My current plan is just to replace the 2tb drives with the new Jeff> 3tb drives and move on, I’d like to do it on line with out Jeff> having to trash the array and start again, so does anyone have a Jeff> game plan for doing that. You don't say how your system is setup, whether or not you have LVM on top of the MD RAID5 array or not. If you, you could simply do: 1. Build a new RAID6 array with five disks (buying another one like I suggest above). 2. Add this into your VG with the 4x2tb disks. 3. pvmove all your data onto the new PVs: pvmove -b <VG> <old-raid5-PV> And once it's done, you can them remove that PV from the VG and pull them from the system. Or turn them into a scratch space until they die... Jeff> Or is a 9tb raid 5 array the wrong thing to be doing and should Jeff> I be doing something else 6tb raid 10 or something I’m open to Jeff> suggestions. Depends on how good your backups are and how critical it is that this data stay online. John -- 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
