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SoftRAID Volumes
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I was so sure I read that it was possible to add drives to expand for example a raid 5 setup with additional drives, a long time ago.
But now when I tried to look for how to do that I see it’s not possible.
I have off site backups so it would be possible to set it all up again.
It is just that it would give me a lot of extra work.
I understand that there is a risk in moving data around between drives if theoretically one extra would be added. But I really hope that you are considering to add drive expansion as a feature. Add a warning/disclamer informing about the risk.
If a disk failure would occur while I was adding for example a 4th disk, it would still take me the same amount of time as of now when I have to start fresh and get everything from a backup.
I don’t see the loss more than a missing feature?
Raid 5 is not meant to be a total backup solution no raid is, would be happy if you could inform me if I have gotten anything wrong.
And I understand and respect that it’s not just a press of a button on your part to implement such feature.
Many thanks
Posted : 28/04/2019 4:56 pm
The way most hardware does this is simply "concatenate" the extra disk onto the back of the volume. We do not consider that a useful approach to this problem/feature request.
So adding a disk means moving data around.
Consider a RAID 5 volume spreads data around in 16K chunks, so every file is spread into small fragments, plus a parity slice.
Adding a drive means relocating nearly 100% of the data to new locations, 16K at a time. This is harder to do safely with "random" consumer hardware, as we cannot count on all users to have solid enclosures. So this kind of feature has to be reliable even with unreliable hardware.
Expanding RAID 5 by adding a disk is unlikely to be added in the near future. We are first going to add some important features like "dual parity" on RAID volumes to improve reliability.
Posted : 29/04/2019 12:02 pm
