[CentOS] Software Raids Questions (I have only ever used hardware?)

Ross Walker rswwalker at gmail.com
Mon Sep 28 01:11:50 UTC 2009


On Sep 27, 2009, at 8:56 PM, Karanbir Singh <mail-lists at karan.org>  
wrote:

> On 27/09/09 21:32, aurfalien at 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




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