Monday, January 14, 2013

[RAID] Updated the RAID5 yet again

My RAID5 on frisket was running dangerously low on space. When I noticed that it only had 100GB's left, I knew it was time to either upgrade or delete massive amounts of data. To those that are saying 100GB is plenty of space, the drive was 98% full, and I still had about 500GB of data on various external drives that needed copying to the main server.

I decided that even deleting all my rips, I would still fill up again within a year. I needed another 2TB HD, if the server could handle it. I also needed a backup. RAID is not a backup. It will guard against single drive failure yes, but not against misguided fingers. Checked the server setup, and I still have 2 SATA ports free ( on the expansion card). I also had one more open 3.5" bay.

I bought a 2TB internal drive, a Seagate Barracuda instead of my regular Hitachi's. I also bought a 2TB external drive, for backups and safeguarding critical data for the RAID grow. Growing a raid is non-destructive.. if all goes well. But getting any command wrong, formatting the wrong drive, or a power failure at a critical moment can all lead to a broken RAID, and lost data. 

I copied all my TV Shows and Movies to the 2TB drive. That almost completely filled the drive. I also copied over any data that couldn't be replaced, and weren't stored anywhere else. This filled up any left over nooks and crannies in all my external drives. Unfortunately my 500GB and 750GB external drives are now at my parent's place and remotely transferring 500GB+ worth of data back and forth on my 100KB/s upload is just not plausible. 

On Sunday I started the procedure. I used the same procedure I outlined here RAID5-fun. Currently the RAID has about 23 hours left on the re-sync. After that I have to resize the file-system in order to utilize the free space.

Update: Took roughly 26 hours total to do the grow of the raid partition. Currently I'm running e2fsck to check the filesystem over, then the filesystem has to be grown. 

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