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XtrmGmr99

Member

Registered: 2009-04-14

Posts: 128

Converting to RAID0 WITHOUT a total reinstall?

Hello,

Holidays are coming up, and Santa is bringing me a present in the form of a new 2TB drive to replace the Frankenstein build of my servers 4 drives. Eventually, I'm going to add onto this with another 2TB disk, creating a RAID0 array.

I know it's fairly easy to convert to a RAID1 array as shown here, but is it possible to do the same but for RAID0? And also, after a while I'll add another 2TB drive to the mix, and was hoping that I could convert the RAID0 to RAID5 to offer performance AND redundancy...

I'm guessing that the answer is no, there is no way to achieve what I'm looking for, but I might as well ask.

XtrmGmr99

Member

Registered: 2009-04-14

Posts: 128

Re: Converting to RAID0 WITHOUT a total reinstall?

And of course, as I posted this I ran across this: http://www.arkf.net/blog/?p=47

Perhaps instead of creating a RAID0 array with my second disk, I'll create a RAID1 array and then convert that to RAID5 with the third.

I'm still interested in hearing about any other conversion methods!

rusty99

Member

Registered: 2009-03-18

Posts: 253

Re: Converting to RAID0 WITHOUT a total reinstall?

Some good reading - at http://constantin.glez.de/blog/2010/01/ … still-best

Fruity

Member

Registered: 2009-12-16

Posts: 198

Re: Converting to RAID0 WITHOUT a total reinstall?

You also might want to look into raid5 vs raid10. 10 is prefered over 5, but the downside is you need 4 (IIRC) Drives for raid10, but can get away with 3 for raid5. As you are looking long term, perhaps the way to go is raid1 > buy more drives sometime later > raid10.

One thing I recal about raid5 vs raid10 is the huge impact rebuilding a raid5 array causes, both in system utilisation and time taken. 10 is far better. It's after all mirroring and stripping. Have a good read aout the pros and cons before you jump in with raid5