MDADM RAID5 coversion to RAID6 and drive sizes.
 

Currently ive got 5x 1TB drives in RAID5. Im about to add a 6th, at the same time i want to add another drive and convert to RAID6, is this possible?

Also, can i add a 1.5TB drive, use 1TB of it and then later down the track add another 1.5TB drive and use both unused 500GB to combine them into a 1tb partition (for use in the raid)?

Will this effect performance of the raid or system?

Hi,

i'm not sure if you can go from RAID5 to RAID6.

Yes it is possible to use only 1TB from 1,5TB drive, because software RAID is partition based. If you create 2 different RAID's on the same disk performance will get effected if you will have I/O, because you only have 1 physical disk with 2 RAIDs. This means copying data between this to RAID systems will have the same performance like copying from one partition to another on the same disk.

Are you doing hardware or software raid?

if its a hardware raid
For the 1.5TB drive. Nope cant do it that way i will mark the drive as used fully but will only use 1 tb.


e.g. If you had a system with 1 80gb and 4 500gb drives and made a raid 5 array, the array would be 320gb total because it would only use 80 from each drive. by the remaining 420gb would be unavailable