Replaced smaller HDD in RAID5 with larger HDD

  • Hello, all! Long time lurker and first time poster. I currently have a RAID5 setup as follows: 2 x 500 HDD, and 1 x 1TB HDD. I was initially running a 320 GB in tandem with 2 x 500 GB HDD in RAID5, so the most storage allocated to me was 600 GB across the three drives. I know that it caters to the weakest link. The 320 GB HDD was recently replaced with a 1 TB HDD due to lack of storage in my case. I powered everything down (although my mobo does support hot swap) and everything was rebuilt well. My only issue is to try to figure out how to grow the RAID5 setup as the 320 GB HDD is no longer the weakest link. I should be seeing around a TB of storage. Can anyone walk me through this? I have proper backups of all my folders good to go in case I need to rebuild the whole thing. Thanks!


    Edit: I am running the latest version of OMV at 1.4.

  • Have you went to the menu option labelled "File Systems" and selected the file system on top of your raid array and hit grow?

    DAMONSTER - OMV 1.8 - 42TB RAID6
    XEON 1270 v3 - 16GB SAMSUNG ECC - X10SL7-F - ANTEC 1200 - HIGHPOINT 2720 - HIGHPOINT 640L - CORSAIR RM750 -

  • No, the first step should be grow under raid management, then resize under file systems.

    Homebox: Bitfenix Prodigy Case, ASUS E45M1-I DELUXE ITX, 8GB RAM, 5x 4TB HGST Raid-5 Data, 1x 320GB 2,5" WD Bootdrive via eSATA from the backside
    Companybox 1: Standard Midi-Tower, Intel S3420 MoBo, Xeon 3450 CPU, 16GB RAM, 5x 2TB Seagate Data, 1x 80GB Samsung Bootdrive - testing for iSCSI to ESXi-Hosts
    Companybox 2: 19" Rackservercase 4HE, Intel S975XBX2 MoBo, C2D@2200MHz, 8GB RAM, HP P212 Raidcontroller, 4x 1TB WD Raid-0 Data, 80GB Samsung Bootdrive, Intel 1000Pro DualPort (Bonded in a VLAN) - Temp-NFS-storage for ESXi-Hosts

  • Thanks for the reply, guys! Yes, I have tried to grow the array in the GUI and tried to grow the file share. However, the only option for growing the RAID array is by adding another disk that is not already in the array. Without the array realizing that the smaller HDD is no longer the weakest link, it's looking like I'm going to have to rebuild.

  • Ok, then you should go the way growing the raid from the command line.
    What's the output of mdadm --detail /dev/md127?

    Homebox: Bitfenix Prodigy Case, ASUS E45M1-I DELUXE ITX, 8GB RAM, 5x 4TB HGST Raid-5 Data, 1x 320GB 2,5" WD Bootdrive via eSATA from the backside
    Companybox 1: Standard Midi-Tower, Intel S3420 MoBo, Xeon 3450 CPU, 16GB RAM, 5x 2TB Seagate Data, 1x 80GB Samsung Bootdrive - testing for iSCSI to ESXi-Hosts
    Companybox 2: 19" Rackservercase 4HE, Intel S975XBX2 MoBo, C2D@2200MHz, 8GB RAM, HP P212 Raidcontroller, 4x 1TB WD Raid-0 Data, 80GB Samsung Bootdrive, Intel 1000Pro DualPort (Bonded in a VLAN) - Temp-NFS-storage for ESXi-Hosts

    Einmal editiert, zuletzt von datadigger ()

  • Datadigger, the output from that command is:



    I am running all this from SSH, is that adequate for these operations? Or do I need to be directly interfacing with the machine? Thank you for your input!

  • If you can trust your network quality than is is ok, I do all the management stuff over SSH because all these machines in my footer do not have a monitor or keyboard and some of them are far away from my desk.


    Ok, your raid actually looks good. Now let's do some final checks.
    Please post the output of:
    df -h
    fdisk -l
    egrep 'ata[0-9]\.|SATA link up' /var/log/dmesg
    So we can check if the hdd's are correctly recognized.

    Homebox: Bitfenix Prodigy Case, ASUS E45M1-I DELUXE ITX, 8GB RAM, 5x 4TB HGST Raid-5 Data, 1x 320GB 2,5" WD Bootdrive via eSATA from the backside
    Companybox 1: Standard Midi-Tower, Intel S3420 MoBo, Xeon 3450 CPU, 16GB RAM, 5x 2TB Seagate Data, 1x 80GB Samsung Bootdrive - testing for iSCSI to ESXi-Hosts
    Companybox 2: 19" Rackservercase 4HE, Intel S975XBX2 MoBo, C2D@2200MHz, 8GB RAM, HP P212 Raidcontroller, 4x 1TB WD Raid-0 Data, 80GB Samsung Bootdrive, Intel 1000Pro DualPort (Bonded in a VLAN) - Temp-NFS-storage for ESXi-Hosts

  • Datadigger, it looks like everything is sound as far as HDD recognition. The SMART enabled tasks also seem to see everything correctly. Here is the output from those commands:



    There is a 32 GB SSD that is connected to the SATA3 port that hosts the OS. Then I have 2 x 500 GB Hitachi drives in tandem with 1 x 1 TB WD Red on the SATA2 ports. So everything seems to be in order.
    Edited for accuracy and posterity!

  • Datagravedigger, please. :)


    Yes that looks ok. So let's start growing. Do you have a complete backup of the data partition handy? Even the makers of mdadm will and can not guarantee that everything will go well and every system has it's peculiarities.


    From the command line enter mdadm --grow /dev/md127 --size=max
    If you look in parallel at the web-gui/raid management you should see that the resyncing process has been started immediately. And look at the capacity value, this should show the already growed disk space - roughly about 1TB (500x3-500). Let it finish.


    If you enter df -h after the resyncing process is complete you will see no difference. Now the filesystem has to be growed, too. This can be done from the web-gui, click on the raid partition and on the resize-button. This should be fast and the new size can be viewed. Enter df -h again and now it should have the new size.

    Homebox: Bitfenix Prodigy Case, ASUS E45M1-I DELUXE ITX, 8GB RAM, 5x 4TB HGST Raid-5 Data, 1x 320GB 2,5" WD Bootdrive via eSATA from the backside
    Companybox 1: Standard Midi-Tower, Intel S3420 MoBo, Xeon 3450 CPU, 16GB RAM, 5x 2TB Seagate Data, 1x 80GB Samsung Bootdrive - testing for iSCSI to ESXi-Hosts
    Companybox 2: 19" Rackservercase 4HE, Intel S975XBX2 MoBo, C2D@2200MHz, 8GB RAM, HP P212 Raidcontroller, 4x 1TB WD Raid-0 Data, 80GB Samsung Bootdrive, Intel 1000Pro DualPort (Bonded in a VLAN) - Temp-NFS-storage for ESXi-Hosts

  • Awesome, I'll give that a shot when I get home from the office. When you say a complete backup of the data partition, do you mean the files on the Samba share? Or is there something more technical I need to backup? I apologize for the name misspelling! 8|

  • Awesome, I'll give that a shot when I get home from the office. When you say a complete backup of the data partition, do you mean the files on the Samba share?


    Exactly, you are on the way to alter the base of the samba shares. The system drive wouldn't be affected (Fingers crossing...).

    Or is there something more technical I need to backup?


    Well, it is always a good idea to have a full backup of the system for the rainy days.
    There are two plugins available for backup: openmediavault-backup 1.0.6 (Delivered by omv-extras) for the system and openemdiavault-usbbackup 1.1 for the data shares.

    I apologize for the name misspelling! 8|


    Nevermind. Just kidding. ;)

    Homebox: Bitfenix Prodigy Case, ASUS E45M1-I DELUXE ITX, 8GB RAM, 5x 4TB HGST Raid-5 Data, 1x 320GB 2,5" WD Bootdrive via eSATA from the backside
    Companybox 1: Standard Midi-Tower, Intel S3420 MoBo, Xeon 3450 CPU, 16GB RAM, 5x 2TB Seagate Data, 1x 80GB Samsung Bootdrive - testing for iSCSI to ESXi-Hosts
    Companybox 2: 19" Rackservercase 4HE, Intel S975XBX2 MoBo, C2D@2200MHz, 8GB RAM, HP P212 Raidcontroller, 4x 1TB WD Raid-0 Data, 80GB Samsung Bootdrive, Intel 1000Pro DualPort (Bonded in a VLAN) - Temp-NFS-storage for ESXi-Hosts

  • Well, I decide to do some final prep work before I run those commands you gave me. I ran the update manager from the GUI, and I am now on version 1.5. Then I heard an odd "crunching" noise coming from one of the HDDs in the NAS. I did a reboot from the GUI, and it all seemed silent. I decided to add the backup plugin (I already had USB Backup) just for one more layer of ease. It doesn't seem like it ever finished installing the backup plugin, and when I look at the CPU usage it's hovering around 57% on a quad-core i5 2500k. It's been like this for about 10 minutes or so. I'm going to leave it alone for now until I get some feedback. Datadigger, what would you say to do?


    Edit: Seems to be back up and running. Away we go! I'll report back in a moment!
    Edit: Just entered the first command to grow it from the CLI. Everything looks great so far! I will probably expand the share in the morning. I'll report back. Thanks so much again, Datadigger!


    Update: Before I grew the array, the "crunching" turned into a "the HDD won't spin up". As of right now, I have the NAS turned off while I'm waiting on the replacement drive. When I shut it down, the array was in a degraded state, yet it was at 1 TB. Thanks, again, Datadigger!

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