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Creating Volumes
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Topic starter
I currently have a OWC ThunderBay 4 Mini with 4x8TB SSD (32TB) in RAID5.
I'd like to expand the RAID5 to 64TB while using as little desk space (and money) as possible, which led me to the idea of just doubling the setup and daisy chaining it.
I have the following questions:
A. Unless all individual drives are replaced with higher capacity (too expensive), there is no option to expand the capacity of an existing RAID5 drive using SoftRaid?
B. Assuming A is true, is there a better option than to delete the current RAID5, create a new one spanning all 8 drives across the daisy chained two ThunderBay enclosures, and copy the files back from another backup?
C. The current setup is performing at ~500MB/s write and ~800MB/s reads. Can I expect a performance gain using two daisy chained ThunderBay enclosures?
Thanks in advance for your help.
Posted : 07/09/2023 5:47 am
Correct, we cannot 'add disks' to a RAID volume to make it larger. the only way is replacing drives one by one, to get the larger capacity.
B is your only option.
Yes you shoudl get faster performance with 8 drives.
Note: to span across enclosures, you need SoftRAID Pro.
Posted : 07/09/2023 7:45 am
BurningMan reacted
Topic starter
Thanks for the answer. What would be your best guess as to how fast the performance will be after? 1.5x? 2x? (Single enclosure RAID5 was 500/800 mb/s write/read). Will read/write performance be affected differently?
Posted : 07/09/2023 4:30 pm
My guess is close to double, not quite, but should be close!
Posted : 07/09/2023 6:40 pm
Topic starter
Awesome, will try. Would I get close to triple the performance if I were to distribute the 8 drives across three enclosures (i.e. 3+3+2 drives) instead of two (with 4+4 drives)?
Posted : 14/09/2023 4:07 am
For HDD's no. A single enclosure won't saturate the bus so whether 1, 2 or 3 enclosures won't matter.
Posted : 14/09/2023 7:56 pm
Topic starter
Unfortunately I was unable to create a RAID4 volume due to Error 128 described here.
Posted : 15/09/2023 8:48 pm
You cannot create any volume with SoftRAID, correct?
Does the SoftRAID Application have "full disk access"?
Posted : 15/09/2023 9:49 pm
