On 2012-04-05 15:17, Toby Corkindale 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.
Consider buying some more 2TB disks (at $125 a pop they're not dear), and then building a new array.
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.
Also note that mdadm(1) states: Grow Grow (or shrink) an array, or otherwise reshape it in some way. Currently supported growth options including changing the active size of component devices and changing the number of active devices in RAID levels 1/4/5/6, changing the RAID level between 1, 5, and 6, changing the chunk size and layout for RAID5 and RAID5, as well as adding or removing a write-intent bitmap. I've never tried the above, so don't know how reliable it is, but you may be game enough to give it a go. -- Regards, Matthew Cengia