RAID 5 add a drive

    I had a RAID 5 with 3 8TB hard drives. It was getting to be time to think about what to do next before I run out of space. I took 2 external backups of the raid, put one offsite. I bought another 8TB hard drive to add to the RAID.


    I added the drive into the tower, it detected it no problem. Through the GUI, I selected the option to expand and added the drive. It spent a few days reshaping the RAID. It finished today.


    However - I'm not seeing the additional space.


    Looking at the RAID in the gui, the capacity is showing a larger size of 21.83 TB, but when I go into the file system it shows 11.99 TB used, 2.45 TB available - the same as before the reshaping.


    What gives? Where's my extra space?

  • crashtest

    Added the Label resolved

    Yes, and you would need to replace your old drives "one after one" to actually utilize the full capacity of your new drive.


    For now the new drive will never use more then 3.8 TB.

    Everything is possible, sometimes it requires Google to find out how.

    • New
    Quote from SerErris

    Yes, and you would need to replace your old drives "one after one" to actually utilize the full capacity of your new drive.


    For now the new drive will never use more then 3.8 TB.

    What did you mean by "you would need to replace your old drives "one after one" to actually utilize the full capacity of your new drive" ?

    • New

    I think he read your "3 8 TB" as "3.8 TB" not "3 x 8 TB"


    That said, I have had RAID re-shapes and filesystem grows go wrong a couple of times. As such I would never even attempt one without a full data backup, and since a data backup now exists, I generally tend to wipe the drives, create a fresh array and file system and copy the data back, which is what I would have to do if the reshape/grow goes wrong anyway.


    It's slower than if the reshape/grow works for a single drive expansion like you did, but way faster than trying to use reshape/grow to change all the drives to larger ones, as you have to do it one drive at a time with a full array resync in between.

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