MDADM RAID5 coversion to RAID6 and drive sizes.

kripz · 12-01-2009, 08:58 PM

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?

mesiol · 12-03-2009, 06:31 AM

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.

slimm609 · 12-03-2009, 06:33 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by kripz

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?

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