Re: How to Upgrade Drives in a DMRAID config?

[Kevin Thomas <axel2078@gmail.com>]

Could you move your data off somewhere temporarily and just rebuild
the array with the new drives?

Sent from my iPhone

On Jul 18, 2013, at 15:19, Laszlo <laszloacs@gmail.com> wrote:

> I have a Ubuntu 11.10 system upgraded to latest everything and have a /Data partitioned on 4 - 320Gb drives configured using DMRAID as a RAID5 array.  I recently acquired a bunch of 1.5Tb drives and figured I'd upgrade my array with 4 bigger drives, one at a time.  My thought is to fail one drive at a time, replace that drive with a new 1.5Tb drive and rebuild the array until all 4 drives have been replaced.  Then, I expect to expand the array to utilize the additional space made available.
>
> The problem is I can't seem to determine how to fail a drive.  I tried simply removing one, but that doesn't appear to put the array in a state where I can simply add a drive in the missing slot.  Google is no help so far.
>
> My system has an NVIDIA chipset with RAID disabled on the Mobo BIOS and this array was not configured using any MOBO or BIOS tools.  I remember that I had to use DMRAID a couple of years ago instead of MDADM since the NVIDIA chipset had a problem with MDADM.  Here's a little more info from the machine:
>
>
>
>
> ~$ cat /proc/mdstat
> Personalities :
> unused devices: <none>
>
> ~$ sudo dmsetup info
> Name:
> nvidia_aafjfffa1
> State:
> ACTIVE
> Read Ahead:         256
> Tables present:     LIVE
> Open count:         1
> Event number:       0
> Major, minor:       253, 1
> Number of targets:  1
> UUID:   DMRAID-nvidia_aafjfffa1
>
> Name:
> nvidia_aafjfffa
> State:
> ACTIVE
> Read Ahead:         3072
> Tables present:     LIVE
> Open count:         1
> Event number:       167007
> Major, minor:       253, 0
> Number of targets:  1
> UUID:   DMRAID-nvidia_aafjfffa
>
> ~$ sudo dmraid -r
>
> |----------+--------+------------------+----------+---------+----------------+---------|
> | Device   | Format |
> Name
> |   Type   | Status? | Size (sectors) |
> ?       |
> |----------+--------+------------------+----------+---------+----------------+---------|
> | /dev/sde | nvidia | nvidia_aafjfffa  | raid5_ls |
> ok      |
> 625142446 | data@ 0 |
> | /dev/sdd | nvidia | nvidia_aafjfffa  | raid5_ls |
> ok      |
> 625142446 | data@ 0 |
> | /dev/sdc | nvidia | nvidia_aafjfffa  | raid5_ls |
> ok      |
> 625142446 | data@ 0 |
> | /dev/sdb | nvidia | nvidia_aafjfffa  | raid5_ls |
> ok      |
> 625142446 | data@ 0 |
> |----------+--------+------------------+----------+---------+----------------+---------|
>
>
>
>
> I don't want to trash my existing array and lose any of it's content.  Creating an additional array in this box is not an option since I've already used up all the available connections and have no internal physical space to add 4 drives.  Anyone have any idea how to proceed with my project?
>
> -- Laszlo


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