actech Posted January 7, 2011 Posted January 7, 2011 Hi, One of my servers is running 2*250Gb HDD's in raid 1 but I have almost run out of room. I have another spare HDD of the same size so I could put that in and re-configure to have a raid 5 array to give me more space. Can anyone see a problem with that. Backing up the extra space is not a problem, but I have head that raid 5 is not the best?!? Any criticism would be appreciated
3s-gtech Posted January 7, 2011 Posted January 7, 2011 RAID 5 is good, but suffers when hosting SQL databases I believe (not had any problems myself, but not a heavy SQL user). You probably won't be able to re-configure, depending on the RAID controller - I'm used to old-skool where you'll wipe the array if you change the setup. If you take an image of the data as it is, you should be able to restore to RAID 5.
mattx Posted January 7, 2011 Posted January 7, 2011 I think you can do it with some specialized software [ depending on RAID card etc ] but if it was me, I would backup [ full ] destroy the RAID 1, and then re-configure to RAID 5. I'm old school when it comes to this sort of thing but others may let you know of other methods.
Norphy Posted January 7, 2011 Posted January 7, 2011 You can't just change a RAID 1 array to a RAID 5 array, you will lose all of your data. You'd have to backup/image what's on the RAID 1 array and restore it once you've destroyed the RAID 1 and created the RAID 5. RAID 5 has its advantages and disadvantages. You'll probably get a little more read performance out of your array but depending on your RAID controller you may see reduced write performance. In terms of redundancy, RAID 5 is no worse than RAID 1 because you can still lose a single disk in the array and not lose your data although rebuilds take longer. Just as an aside, can you not add the spare 250GB drive as an additional volume?
strawberry Posted January 8, 2011 Posted January 8, 2011 you wont get much extra space by using raid 5, you always lose one disk to parity in a raid 5 array. Probably best not to bodge or try to add storage on the cheap.
actech Posted January 8, 2011 Author Posted January 8, 2011 Thanks for the replies. I always intended to do a full backup and then restore onto a new array as I knew that rebuilding the array would not keep the data intact. Norphy - I did think about that but then I have no redundancy at all if the drive fails which for me is a no-no.
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