Upgrading drives in a RAID6 array.

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unix_foo

[H]ard|Gawd
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Jun 21, 2002
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I currently have 12 x 1TB HDDs in RAID6 configuration with an Areca 1231ML card. I am running out of drive space so I bought 12 x 3TB Hitachis.

Is it possible to replace a drive at a time in my existing array and rebuild (12 times)? Will the end result give me 30TB of storage or the original 10TB?

Thanks.
 
I believe it should but do you really want to take 12+ days to do it? As I'd imagine a single rebuild on that array would easily be 24hrs.
 
At work on linux software raid this is how I upgrade drives on raid6 even though I have a tape backup (most likely 2 backups). I believe I have done the same with a 3ware card on windows however I do not use much hardware raid these days.
 
I believe somebody on this forum did just that...replaced each drive one at a time. Once all drives are swapped the array should auto increase in size. May wish to, you know, post your quesiton in the Areca owners thread. Just an idea.
 
I would have a complete backup in place before I did 12 rebuilds and a capacity expansion. You already spent $1300+ on new drives. I would pick up a few extra 3TB drives, backup your array to the single drives, take out all 12 1TB drives which becomes a second backup in effect, install the new drives in the array, initialize it once and then restore from the new 3TB single drives. 3 extra 3TB drives should do it unless the 10TB you have is completely full, and an extra $330 will save you a lot of grief in case something goes horribly wrong in the upgrade. It will also give you a few extra drives. You could then resell 2 of them (or, ahem, return them) and keep the third as a cold spare (which is a good thing to have on hand immediately for a rebuild)
 
mwroobel said:
I would pick up a few extra 3TB drives, backup your array to the single drives, take out all 12 1TB drives which becomes a second backup in effect...
Click to expand...

+1 to this approach.

Doing that many rebuilds on a single array is just scary, not to mention the fact that it would take forever.

Doing as above is going to be a whole lot safer (for your data) and quicker to boot ...
 
You don't even need to buy additional drives*:
-copy your current 10TB of data to 4 of the 12 individual 3TB drives.
-remove all 12 1TB drives.
-create a new RAID6 array with the remaining 8 3TB drives.
-copy the data from the 4 individual drives to the new array.
-add the 4 remaining 3TB drives to the RAID6 array (you can probably add all 4 drives in one go).

There is a significantly smaller chance for anything to go wrong and you still have your original 12 1TB disk RAID set as backup as well.


*) although mwroobel's method is faster and it is probably a good idea to keep one or two cold spare drives for such a large array.
 
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