Stephen Harris wrote: > On Fri, Aug 22, 2008 at 03:05:30PM -0400, Ross S. W. Walker wrote: > > Stephen Harris wrote: > > > Or you could just boot from a LiveCD of a distro that was this and > > run a conversion there, it would make it unavailable during the > > conversion though. > > *grin* My first email on this subject... > > I wonder if I could boot off a Ubuntu CD or something and grow the array > that way. Would be annoying (many hours of server downtime)... I wouldn't use Ubuntu or any Debian based distro cause it's EVMS just might bugger up the LVM config... Try Fedora or OpenSuse they use straight LVM. > > If the array was part of a LVM VG, you could create another 4 drive > > array and add it to the VG and extend the LVs that way, or do a > > pvmove and move everything from the old array to the new. > > Well, it _is_... the old array was 4*500Gb. The new array is 5*1Tb. > In each I've built a single VG/LV. But my machine can't handle 9 SATA > disks (power, controller limitations, space). So what I did was use one > of the TByte disks to copy the data, built the other 4 into an array, > copied the data from the last disk onto the array and then... failed to > extend the array. > > I still have the old 4*500GB on a shelf, but I don't have anything I can > plug it into. > > (My other option is to buy a couple of SATA controllers, build a second > machine then transfer data over the network) Instead of a second machine, how about an external disk enclosure? You can get them rack mountable or tower based. Look for a nice 15 drive enclosure, then you have room to build 2 arrays... A nice hardware RAID card with battery backed cache would make the arrays scream too, for RAID5/6 I always go hardware with BBU Cache. I almost always do the OS disks as software RAID1. Hey with the enclosure going you can use the internal drives for volume snapshots and be able to keep quite a few without killing the storage performance. -Ross ______________________________________________________________________ This e-mail, and any attachments thereto, is intended only for use by the addressee(s) named herein and may contain legally privileged and/or confidential information. If you are not the intended recipient of this e-mail, you are hereby notified that any dissemination, distribution or copying of this e-mail, and any attachments thereto, is strictly prohibited. If you have received this e-mail in error, please immediately notify the sender and permanently delete the original and any copy or printout thereof.