Sanity Check on Expanding Drive Space

[antiwraith]

I've got an 8 bay server running with six 1 TB drives and one 1.2 TB drive.  Dual parity, the 1.2 TB and a 1 TB drive are parity, the others are regular drives.  All are spinning disk.  I've got one empty drive slot.  I want purchase a few 4 TB drives and phase out the smaller capacities, I'm getting low on space and those drives are all getting some age on them.

 

Is the proper process:

 

1.  Install new 4 TB drive in the empty slot

2. Remove the 1 TB parity drive as parity (leaving the 1.2 TB parity drive)

3. Make the new 4 TB drive a parity drive

4. Remove the old 1 TB drive

5. Repeat process with another 4 TB drive and replace the 1.2 TB parity drive with it

6. Use the empty slot formerly in use by the 1.2 TB drive to put in a 3rd 4 TB drive to use for actual data

 

I've five 1 TB data drives and 422 GB free.  Any rough idea how long the remove parity drive / add a new parity drive will take?  Also, is this the correct series of steps to do this?

 

Thanks!

[trurl]

I prefer the word "bay" when talking about physical location of disks, and "port" when talking about how they are connected. 

 

I reserve the word "slot" for talking about the disk assignments since that is how those are referred to in syslog. 

 

You can remove both parity disks and replace them with the new larger disks, assign those to the parity slots, and start the array to build parity on both. 

 

Or you can do them separately if you want. 

 

I usually expect 2-3 hours per TB.

 

Be sure to always double check all connections when mucking about in the case. 

[kizer]

I'd swap out your parity's and then run a parity check.  Drink a cold one and plan your next swap outs.