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Situation:

  • We have two Dell servers running as a cluster.
  • Each of the servers runs a RAID-5 system with actually 5 * 600GB.
  • The data AND the base system itself are stored on the RAID.

Goal:

Now we want to enlarge the space on the RAID-5.

Right now there is 1 slot on each server free left for an additional Harddrive but I'm aware that I can only connect another 600GB drive there or a bigger one but only 600GB will be used for the RAID-5 and that this will only give us 500GB additional usable disk space.

But what if we want to add more space?

Question:

Is it possible to enlarge the space on the RAID-5 on the running System?

I'm thinking e.g. in the following procedure:

  1. (Disconnect the cluster so the re not synced for now)
  2. Disconnect the first harddrive
  3. Connect a bigger one (e.g. 1TB)
  4. Let the RAID-5 rebuild the data on that drive

After doing this for all Harddrives I would now still have the RAID-5 using 600GB on each disk but having 5 * 1TB.

So as last step: Tell the RAID-5 somehow to use the full 1TB on each disk.

Can it be done like this or what would be other options?
And if: How would I actually tell the Raid to be bigger?

derHugo
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1 Answers1

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you can do that, but be avare that you actively remove the redundancy here so if just one of oyur drives is faulty it will fail to rebuild

so only do that if you got a complete backup

another option would be to just add another drive to the raid5, though this will increase likelyhood of failure a little bit since you simply have another drive that might fail and didn#t add more redundancy

there is a complete guide on https://raid.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Growing

fireba11
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