LSI RAID-5 to RAID-6 conversion?

dexvx

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Aug 14, 2002
Messages
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System is a Xeon E3-1275v3, 2x 2GB ECC, LSI 9261-8i with BBU, 4x 4TB WD Red's in RAID-5, Server 2012 R2.

Disk space is getting full, so I plan on adding an additional 4x 4TB WD Red's. But instead of having two 4 disk RAID-5 arrays, a single 8 disk RAID-6 solution seems better.

Any thoughts/comments?
 
i had about the same but with 2TB drives and the 9260-8i and no bbu. but i did have a ups. obviously my dataset was smaller so YMMV but i had no issues at all. just took a bit.
i did mine "online" while booted into my windows server as opposed to the web-bios of the card
 
R6 is the far better option over R5 in almost every case. Depending on your board, double parity might give you a write speed penalty, but in an 8 drive R6 ANY 2 drives can fail and still offer you uptime, where in a 2x 4 drive R5 if the wrong 2 drives fail you are SOL.
 
Ugh, I read someone on ServeTheHome doing this on an Adaptec 6805 with 8TB data (6 disk R5 to 8 disk R6). Apparently it took them 16 days.

Think I might just go buy a few cheaper 3 TB's, RAID-6 them, and the convert the WD 4 TB's to a RAID-6 after I move all the data off. Lesson to be had folks, plan your RAID arrays wisely.
 
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