Re: upgrade advice

[Redeeman <redeeman@metanurb.dk>]

On Tue, 2008-12-16 at 06:44 -0500, Justin Piszcz wrote:
> 
> On Tue, 16 Dec 2008, Max Waterman wrote:
> 
> > Hi,
> >
> > I have a 8x200GB RAID5 array - 4 SATA and 4 EIDE. It has 2 spare, so
> > that's only 6 drives actually in the array, making 1TB of space (I
> > think that's right).
> >
> > The drives are quite old now, and people are asking what I want for
> > Christmas...so I'm wondering how to upgrade this setup. Clearly I
> > don't want to retire my existing drives prematurely, since they've
> > shown no sign of problem.
> >
> > My initial thought was to make a RAID1 out of a new 1TB disk and my
> > existing RAID5 array, but perhaps that doesn't make much sense...
> >
> > Perhaps I could get a 400GB drive (or more likely 500GB) and make a
> > RAID1 with a couple of the existing 200GBs?
> >
> > ...but I'm just guessing and the purpose of this email is to get advice.
> >
> > What do you guys think?
> >
> > Max.
> 
> Tough call, depends on what you want to accomplish?  Availability or mass 
> storage space?  You could continue running like you are now and use a 1TiB 
> disk as your "scratch" area and rsync the important data off to your 
> RAID-5 nightly for example.
> 
> Another option (probably not a good one) take two of your 200s and make a 
> RAID1, leave your RAID-5 as-is, buy another 200GiB as a spare and then 
> with the rest of the $ buy something else, there are no good alternatives, 
> those are pretty old disks you got there, but I agree if its been running 
> fine, no reason to replace it.
Hehe, i myself am in a somewhat similar position.. i have a 6x300gb
raid5 array.. And the disks appears perfectly fine through smart etc,
but on the other hand, a SINGLE new disk today can present me with the
same level of usable capacity very cheap, and ill bet using considerably
less power. Thus i have chosen to very soon retire this setup, and make
a replacement 8x1tb or 6x1.5tb raid6 for increased capacity and
safety :)

i'd recommend you work towards deprecating LOTS of drives in favor of
fewer bigger newer, and keep the old ones around as an archive/backup
thing.

> 
> Justin.
> 
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