On Sep 27, 2009, at 8:56 PM, Karanbir Singh mail-lists@karan.org wrote:
On 27/09/09 21:32, aurfalien@gmail.com wrote:
few things;
i'm not hip to the latest barney phife shareware utils that may allow some kind of dynamic raiding bs, but generally, no, you must format those drive to the desired fs after raiding them so back up all data u want housed (or hozed) on that new raid.
This is not true. Even with the extremely basic process, you only need to have 1 disk in 'being prepd' state - which means you can, if there is time and resources, shovel data around on the disks as they get used into the raid setup. Ofcourse, you will need to have 1 disk clear.
Eg. to convert this setup into a raid-5 : start with a 1 disk raid-1 degraded, move a disks worth of data onto there, bring in the second disk and let them sync into a 'normal' raid1 state, then convert that into a raid-5 with the 3rd disk. then bring in the 4th disk as hotspare.
with TiB's worth of data, its not going to be quick.
Can you convert a RAID0 to a RAID5?
With a proper backup of the data in place that might be more efficient then a RAID1 to 5.
-Ross