Converting a single HDD to 3 with Raid 5

vulcan4d · 27. April 2014

I am sure this question came up but searching comes up with unrelated raid questions, so I apologize if this is a repeated question.

Currently I have a single 3TB drive and I just bought two more so I can turn them to Raid 5. Is it possible to do this without losing the initial data on the first Disc. My first drive is almost full and cant backup anywhere else due to the size.

Thank you.

davidh2k · 27. April 2014

No, you can't convert. But If I remember correctly it is possible to initialize the RAID5 with just two disks.

Greetings
David

earbiter · 28. April 2014

Of course you can do it. Its just a lot of work. Just browse the web for articles like this - http://blog.mycroes.nl/2009/02…ingle-disk-to-3-disk.html

Its says:

- Add the drives to the system
- Create a degraded RAID 5 array on the 2 new drives
- Copy all data to the degraded RAID array
- Clean the old disk and add it to the array

From past experience you can run into problems with grub and getting it to boot. If you really want to try this then I recomend you do it virtually first. Make an image of your omv boot and get that running as a VM. Then you can add the 2 extra 'disks'. Getting them up and running from omv shouldnt be too hard. Migrating the data, getting it to boot is the challenge. Then once its up and degraded, initializing the old boot drive and bringing it into the raid5 and sync'ed. Learning MDADM will be key.

So once you have done it virtually you should have a good feel for doing it with new drives. Depending on how much files you need to save you might just want to start fresh. I loaded squeeze first and got all my partitions setup as raid-5 which isnt possible from the omv installer. Then I loaded omv. Once again, trying it virtually really helped me out.

Linux has come a long way, but GUI tools to do this stuff are still mostly a dream...

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