[TriLUG] upgrading a software (md) RAID

[Brian Cottingham]

If you waited a couple of days between each drive swap to make sure the 
new drives worked, wouldn't the drive-swapping method be just as 
reliable? Isn't half of the point of RAID to handle bad drives? I'd like 
to understand what difference between the two methods inclines the 
swapping method to a "fatal" failure, since the extra drive bays needed 
for the rsync approach aren't always available.

-Brian


On 10/05/2009 04:13 PM, Ronald Kelley wrote:
> Honestly, I would install the new drives, build the new array, create 
> your partitions/filesystems, then rsync the data over.  Let it run for 
> a few days before removing the 500G drives just to make sure you don't 
> have any hardware problems with the new drives.
>
> Doing the one-by-one approach is time consuming and be fatal if one of 
> the new drives is bad.
>
> Hope this helps...
>
>
> -Ron
>
>
>
> On Oct 5, 2009, at 4:06 PM, Charles Mangin wrote:
>
>> i've currently got my home network server running a three drive RAID 
>> system. it's running md (software RAID) under Fedora 11.
>>
>> the drives in there are 500 gigs, and with the prices of 1+ Tb drives 
>> coming down so low, i'd like to increase capacity. ideally, i'd like 
>> to do it without having to migrate my data to some intermediary 
>> device while i build a whole new RAID.
>>
>> is there a good tutorial (that i've yet to find by googling) that has 
>> a good step-by-step on how to do this? the process, as i understand 
>> it, is to replace one drive at a time, rebuilding the array each 
>> time. once all the larger drives are in place, the final rebuild will 
>> show the new capacity. there's bound to be some mdadm fiddling 
>> necessary as well...
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> Charles Mangin
>> Option8, LLC - Making Macs happy since 1999.
>> option8 at option8.com | http://www.option8consulting.com
>> mobile: 919.368.7167
>> skype: option8llc
>>
>>
>>
>>
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>
> Thanks,
>
> -Ron
> rkelleyrtp at gmail.com
>
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