Hello I have 6TB RAID 5 array managed by a High Point RocketRaid 2680 card that currently uses 4 x 2TB disks. I was thinking I could upgrade all 4 disks to 3TB disks for 9TB total storage. I was thinking to upgrade the disks by degrading the array 1 disk at a time, adding each new 3TB disk and then rebuilding each time? Then after all 4 disks are upgraded and the array is rebuilt increase the partition size from 6TB to 9TB? I have the files backed up but want to avoid building a new array from scratch since it means configuring the network share all over again and it also takes ages. What do you reckon, is this reasonable or have I missed something, is this likely to have issues? I am confident one of you lot has the answer, cheers!
I'm pretty sure if you took a 2tb disk out of an array, put a 3tb disk back in and rebuilt it, it would treat it as a 2tb disk. But I might be wrong.
I'd say you'd end up with spare space on the drives to create another array on. It's generally only things like SAN's & some NAS's that can expand
RAID5 does not support expanding an array, if you swap the disks for larger disks the array will not expand. Unless you're using another RAID type your only option is migrating the data off the array, destroying the array and creating a new array with the larger disks is the only option.
if you're running LVM on top of your existing raid 5 then I can think of ways of doing it without building the new array and migrating data, but i'd probably still choose to do the latter.
Yeah software RAID is a different kettle of fish to hardware RAID and often provides extra features outside the traditional spec of RAID, like being able to expand an array and change the RAID type.
