0

I currently have a pair of 2Tb drives in a case that will take up to 4 hard drives in hot swappable bays and have up to now been manually copying files from Drive 1 to Drive 2......manually doing what a mirrored raid would do in effect.

The operating system is installed on a separate SSD and the 2Tb drives used for storage of files (photos mainly plus other working files) are approaching the point of being full.

I am thinking about creating a mirrored RAID on a pair of either 10 or 12 Tb hard drives.

My question......is there anything preventing me from removing the 2Tb drives, creating a RAID on said 10 / 12Tb drives (in bays 1 & 2) and once that's done inserting one of the original 2Tb drives into bay 3 and copying the files from that to the new disk......allowing the RAID to do its thing as it should and populate both the new hard drives.

Apologies for the long wordy description.....thought it was detail needed to explain what I'm trying to do. Thanks for any input you can give.....just be gentle, this is my first post here :-)

Improve this question
4
  • 1
    Yes; what you describe will result in the loss of data on the smaller drive
    – Ramhound
    May 21, 2018 at 21:21
  • I'm trying to understand why this will result in a loss of data If the original hard drives have been removed from the machine when the RAID is built on a new pair of drives and one of the original drives then put back in bay 3 and the data copied from that to the new disks/s.
    – Grahamh67
    May 21, 2018 at 21:36
  • Because the disk will be synchronized to the empty RAID array. I need specifics on the RAID 4-disk bay to answer this question. You would have to put the larger disk with the current array, but that won’t increase your array die, if you do that.
    – Ramhound
    May 21, 2018 at 21:39
  • Is this hardware or software raid? This could be possible but there could be a risk to data depending on the RAID controller. Also, some controllers will let you do a rolling upgrade - iie upgrade disk 1, rebuild mirror into it, upgrade disk 2, rebuild mirror on to it and expand drive. I know it can be done in software raid on Linux.
    – davidgo
    May 22, 2018 at 10:50

0

Reset to default

You must log in to answer this question.

Browse other questions tagged .