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Managing Disks - Certify, Verify, Initialize
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Topic starter
After reading a bunch of topics, I think I am correct that I can do this and want to verify with the experts that if I want to expand the capacity of my current Thunderbolt Flex 8 RAID5 setup which is currently utilizing 8 discs (all reading healthy) by expanding the volume without copying to external storage and starting from a wholly new RAID volume - I want to expand the storage of the RAID in place, I can do so by:
1) purchasing 8 higher capacity HDDs (ideally each of the same capacity, but all larger than the current hard drives - I will be limited to the capacity of the minimum capacity hard drive x8 for the overall size of the expanded RAID5 setup)
2) following the procedure for replacing each of the 8 current HDDs one HDD at a time, verifying, initializing, and then rebuilding the parity information on the new drive after each replacement; once all 8 drives are replaced/rebuilt, they will each have identical unused space at the end of each drive, and I can
3) Use SoftRAID to resize the total size of the RAID5 across the 8 drives, and the capacity of the RAID will increase proportionally to the newly added aggregate storage.
I am running latest MacOS and latest Softraid.
Am I correct that this procedure should work? I would like to be sure before purchasing drives or causing an issue with my current setup.
Thanks!
Posted : 11/09/2023 11:54 am
Yes you can do this. You will need SoftRAID 7.6 to resize, but it will be released before you finish rebuilding each disk in the array.
Posted : 11/09/2023 5:56 pm
HaroldMU reacted
@softraid-support Follow up question: when doing this, replacing a single drive, can you do this "hot" with the ThunderBay and the computer running? Does the software understand that I would want to certify the new drive, etc.? I have 7.6 on Ventura 13.5.2.
Posted : 12/09/2023 3:03 pm
Yes, SoftRAID and Thunderbolt are "hot swappable". However, certify is an end user step to prepare the drive and is an independent step. You certify before you initialize the disk to add it to the volume.
Posted : 12/09/2023 11:41 pm
Topic starter
So I ran into a hiccup. I replaced 6 of the 8 drives with a larger drive, and all 6 new HDs so far did the initialize/rebuild without an issue and gave a confirmation message after 12-20hrs each. Drive 7 I placed in the drive slot, and then when turning on the Thunderbay drive 8 [original smaller size] threw a few I/O errors which caused Softraid to give a bunch of error messages. This seemed awfully coincidental since no drives had shown any errors prior, so I unmounted and shut down, and after a restart all drives passed their 'SMART' test. However, now I have two identical RAIDS each showing the full 98TB of the original 8 drives combined, one with a single disc (which is an initialized but new drive [intended to be 7 of 8 for the expansion project]), and one with 7 discs, including the supposedly degraded drive.
I do not want to make a mistake and lose my data by choosing to remove or add the wrong disc or some other command. Can you please tell me if it is possible to 'combine' these drives into a complete 8-disc RAID, rebuild and save this thing without starting from scratch? And if so, what are the steps necessary to 'recombine' these two sets into the single RAID again?
I've attached screenshots of the two RAID trees, and a support log file.
Posted : 29/09/2023 11:04 pm
I am not entirely clear on the state of this. The new drive, with 28 hours, it does not appear that it full rebuilt? Do you know? There are only 28 hours on that disk. I am concerned.
Best would be backup/restore. the reason is since the volume has mounted, if you force the split disk to join the raid, the directory data will be different and almost assuredly, there will be directory damage/perhaps file corruption.
Not worth the risk. IO errors do not normally "split" a disk off, so I do not know exactly what happened. but I do not see a rebuild complete for the new disk.
there is a huge amount of data here, so I understand your situation, but I would rather you take no risks.
Posted : 30/09/2023 1:03 am
