I’d like to swap my spinning disks with SSD drives. I have the new disks and they’re just larger than the old ones. My configuration is a RAID-5 with 3 disks (and one hot spare). Can I hot swap a single disk (HDD to SSD), wait for the new disk to rebuild, then repeat?

I’m thinking that I’d mark down the hot spare, replace it with an SSD, mark the SSD as hot spare, mark HDD 1 as “bad” causing the hot spare to activate, then repeat for the other 2 HDDs. I don’t have a lot of experience with RAID, but did perform a single disk swap once with success.

If this is a bad idea, why? What’s the best way to upgrade?

I’m not sure if this is the right community for this question. If not, please guide me to the right one.

Consider moving to RAID-6. Single redundancy is not cool anymore.

@Anonymouse@lemmy.world
creator
link
fedilink
English
01Y

This is just a homelab, running on old hardware. I don’t think the raid controller supports RAID-6 and I only got 3 new SSDs, and I read that RAID-6 needs 4 drives.

Correct. Get a 4th drive. You will be thankful one day down the road when you are rebuilding the array and you lose a drive during the rebuild.

Create a post

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don’t control.

Rules:

  1. Be civil: we’re here to support and learn from one another. Insults won’t be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam posting.

  3. Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it’s not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.

  4. Don’t duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).

  6. No trolling.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

  • 1 user online
  • 191 users / day
  • 419 users / week
  • 1.14K users / month
  • 3.85K users / 6 months
  • 1 subscriber
  • 3.71K Posts
  • 74.6K Comments
  • Modlog