this post was submitted on 18 Jun 2024
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Make a raid 5 with two almost full disk and another one empty (lemm.ee)
submitted 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) by loboaureo@lemm.ee to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
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Hello,

I am going to upgrade my server, taking advantage of the fact that I am going to be able to put more hard disks, I wanted to take advantage of this to give a little more security (against loss) to my data.

Currently I have 2 hard drives in ext4 with information, and wanted to buy a third (same capacity all three) and place them in raid5, so that in the future, I can put more hard drives and increase the capacity.

Due to economic issues, right now I can only buy what would be the third disk, so it is impossible for me to back up the data I currently have.

The data itself is not valuable, in case any file gets corrupted, I could download it again, however there are enough teras (20) to make downloading everything a madness.

In principle I thought to put on this server (PC) a dietpi, a trimmed debian and maybe with mdadm make the raid. I have seen tutorials on how to do it (this for example https://ruan.dev/blog/2022/06/29/create-a-raid5-array-with-mdadm-on-linux ).

The question is, is there any way without having to format the hard drives with data?

Thank you and sorry for any mistakes I may make, English is not my mother language.

EDIT:

Thanks for yours answers!! I have several paths to investigate.

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[–] just_another_person@lemmy.world 1 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (12 children)

He said the two drives are mostly full. It's not a paritioning issue at that point.

[–] chiisana@lemmy.chiisana.net 7 points 5 months ago (11 children)

Even if you could free up only 1GB on each of the drives, you could start the process with a RAID5 of 1GB per disk, migrate two TB of data into it, free up the 2GB in the old disks, to expand the RAID and rinse and repeat. It will take a very long time, and run a lot of risk due to increased stress on the old drives, but it is certainly something that’s theoretically achievable.

[–] HamsterRage@lemmy.ca 9 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

Technically, he would have three drives and only two drives of data. So he could move 1/3 of the data off each of the two drives onto the third and then start off with RAID 5 across the remaining 1/3 of each drive.

[–] chiisana@lemmy.chiisana.net 4 points 5 months ago

This is smart! Should help reduce the number of loops they’d need to go through and could reduce the stress on the older drives.

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