[MLUG] More praise for Linux software RAID

[Hendrik Boom]

On Tue, May 31, 2011 at 05:54:38PM -0400, Nick Nobody wrote:
> On Tue, 2011-05-31 at 17:27 -0400, Hendrik Boom wrote:
> > On Tue, May 31, 2011 at 04:01:28PM -0400, Nick Nobody wrote:
> > > I've said it before and I'll say it again, Linux software RAID is
> > > awesome!
> > > 
> > > A few weeks ago I had a disk die in my NAS (1 of 3 1.5TB Seagate
> > > drives). No problem, mdadm emailed me saying the RAID5 array was
> > > degraded so I picked up a new disk (Western Digital this time) and
> > > within a few hours the array was re-synced and running at full speed.
> > > 
> > > I RMA'd the dead disk and got the replacement back last week. Over the
> > > weekend I added it to the array and used mdadm's "grow" feature to get
> > > access to the extra 1.5TB of space. A little over 2 days later it was
> > > done growing the array without any issues.
> > 
> > I do wonder how you managed to allocate parts of the various copies of 
> > the RAID drive onto the new physical drive.  Or was it a third redundant 
> > drive?
> 
> At this point I had a working RAID5 array with 3 disks. The procedure
> for adding a disk is the following:

Ah!  I should have guessed.  RAID5.

Cool that it was so simple, though.

-- hendrik