On 2008-10-29T16:51:02, Greg Freemyer <greg.freemyer@gmail.com> wrote:
I'd like to start with a 4 disk Raid 10 providing 2 TB of space, but then have the ability to add disks, change raid techniques etc. (ie. convert to raid 6 without data loss!!).
Adding larger drives to an md array works fine. Changing RAID techniques depends on what you want to change, I think; RAID10 to RAID6 should. I would probably put LVM on top of the RAID, but that is probably obvious to you.
Can anyone tell me how well it works and what sorts of things can actually be done.
the linux-raid list might be the best place to ask this; Neil should be responsive, and it depends a bit on the kernel version used.
And can it be used to "shrink" a volume. (I believe XFS supports shrinking a filesystem, so I would first shrink the filesystem, then hopefully use mdadm to shrink the raid array.)
I _think_ this should also work, yes. Shrinking, in particular online, rarely occurs though.
FYI: The Drobo (www.drobo.com) can do the above as I understand it, but the performance is apparently very slow. Only 5 to 8 MB/sec from the reviews I saw. I want at least 80MB/sec when reading large files.
Heh, drobo.com claim all sorts of deficiencies in the OS RAID which are just incorrect. Regards, Lars -- Teamlead Kernel, SuSE Labs, Research and Development SUSE LINUX Products GmbH, GF: Markus Rex, HRB 16746 (AG Nürnberg) "Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes." -- Oscar Wilde -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org