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General discussion

Need Help Upgrading RAID5 Array With Larger Drives

Feb 14, 2011 9:51PM PST

I have a CentOS 5 based Linux system with a 3Ware 9550SU RAID card and four 500GB drives set up in a RAID5 array.

I want to 'replace' these drives with four 2TB drives without data loss. My server case has a total of 8 drive bays all hot-swap and all attached to the RAID card, this means I have four empty drive bays on the RAID card.

One thought is to put the four new 2TB drives in the empty drive bays, configure them in a new RAID5 array. Then the question is now to I "mirror" the original RAID5 array over to the new one?

This is just a thought though, I am not sure it will work. In short my question to this forum is how do I accomplish this upgrade?

Discussion is locked

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RAID 10
Mar 2, 2011 7:36AM PST

Why not go RAID 10 (1+0) then eliminate the smaller drives after making sure all is on the larger (sort of a double-redundancy)?
You may find you want to keep it in 1+0!

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Does not utilize full size of new larger drives?
Mar 2, 2011 10:09AM PST

It is my understanding that the mirrored RAID would only utilize 500MB of the new 2TB drives thus not gaining me the additional space once the mirroring of data is complete. An I missing something?

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In my Opinion
Mar 22, 2011 10:06AM PDT

RAID Arrays was a good idea when the drives were pretty small. Now days a single Hard Drive is pretty cavernous. So I think, there is no much need to make them unless you want to make One gigantic drive. If that is going to be partitioned, it defeat the purpose.

What I am getting is, the way the RAID works or you get a increase of speed writing or reading or a redundancy but you can not get all of benefits at once. If one disk fail you can loose all your data if you are not backing up.

When I was a system admin way back in the days, we used a RAID Arrays, the drives were pretty small, 80 GBs or so. But for a disk with a Tera and above we got away with a single disk and tape back ups.


Might not answer the Poster's issue but just suggesting another approach.
For a home server without a back up, a RAID is suicidal.
With individual disks one goes bad, that is the only loss.

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RAID 1+0 two arrays to one
Mar 24, 2011 4:04AM PDT

after all 8 hdd in two arrays are set up. cannot one copy the 500 giggers to the 1T setup, then disconnect the smaller drives?