Greg Freemyer wrote:
All,
I'm conceptually putting together a NFS server in my head. (I will build it once I know what it is!!)
What I want is something flexible.
ie. Have it start with 3 or 4 drives, then add a drive when I need the capacity. Remove a drive when I don't. replace the drives with bigger drives as the become available. All without losing my data. (Or having to back it up / restore it.)
My first thought - LVM.
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!!).
mdadm --grow implies it can do this, but there is not much there and my google searches did not turn up much either.
I don't think mdadm --grow can do what you want. It's very useful when you for instance want to build a RAID1 in degraded mode (with only one drive), and you later want to add a drive to bring it back to full RAID1. You can probably also add a drive to working RAID1 or maybe even RAID5, but I don't know.
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.)
Most advanced filesystems (jfs,xfs,ext3 et al) support resizing - otherwise the LVM resizing features wouldnt be overly useful :-)
If mdadm can't do any of this, is there a hardware controller card that can?
Take a good look at LVM. -- /Per Jessen, Zürich -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org