From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Henrik Holst Subject: Re: Is shrinking raid5 possible? Date: Fri, 23 Jun 2006 10:34:02 +0200 Message-ID: <449BA77A.4000001@idgmail.se> References: <44960C45.9050407@anu.edu.au> <17558.10906.59066.196870@cse.unsw.edu.au> <449B3A80.4070602@tmr.com> <17563.17224.85968.572754@cse.unsw.edu.au> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Return-path: In-Reply-To: <17563.17224.85968.572754@cse.unsw.edu.au> Sender: linux-raid-owner@vger.kernel.org To: Neil Brown Cc: linux-raid@vger.kernel.org List-Id: linux-raid.ids Neil Brown wrote: > In short, reducing a raid5 to a particular size isn't something that > really makes sense to me. Reducing the amount of each device that is > used does - though I would much more expect people to want to increase > that size. Think about the poor people! :-) Those who can't afford to buy a new disk after a failure but can give up some free space. I actually don't think that that scenario is /highly unlikely/ to occur? And also for the sake of symmetry: If growing is allowed- why should not shrinking be just as valid? Neil Brown wrote: > If Paul really has a reason to reduce the array to a particular size > then fine. I'm mildly curious, but it's his business and I'm happy > for mdadm to support it, though indirectly. But I strongly suspect > that most people who want to resize their array will be thinking in > terms of the amount of each device that is used, so that is how mdadm > works. I agree with you here- keep the parameters "low level". In that way the administrator (users use a GUI) have more control over the operation at hand. (kmdadm anyone? :-)) -- Henrik Holst