On Thu, Apr 5, 2012 at 3:17 PM, Toby Corkindale
<toby.corkindale@strategicdata.com.au> wrote:
On 05/04/12 13:46, Brett Pemberton wrote:
> A home system has N number of 1.5TB drives, running in RAID5.
> At one point, these drives stopped becoming available, so the last time
> I extended the array, I used a 2TB drive.
> Now that a 1.5TB drive has failed, I'm replacing it with another 2TB
> drive, and wondering the best way to use the remainder 500GB
> Is there a better plan?
If two disks have failed and aren't available commercially any more, I'd
say it's likely the rest will go sooner rather than later because
they're all getting too old.
Actually only one disk has failed.
The other 2TB drive in there is because when I last extended the array, 1.5TB drives weren't available.
Consider buying some more 2TB disks (at $125 a pop they're not dear),
and then building a new array.
The issues are:
1) That doesn't provide enough of a jump over my 1.5TB drives, capacity wise, to make it worth it.
2) No space in the machine/enough sata ports to do this.
The array has just over 7TB of data, so to do this with 2TB drives, I'd need 5 at the least.
Which would make a total of 12 drives in the machine. More than it can hold, and more than my 8 sata ports will be happy with.
If anything, I'll contemplate doing this with 3TB drives, once they drop in price enough.
This time, build it with ZFS (or maaaaaybe btrfs if you dare), as with
those you can add more disks (of variable size) later and rebalance files.
I've been pretty happy with XFS on mdadm RAID5.
Not sure if I'd feel safe moving to ZFS yet.
cheers,
/ Brett