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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 [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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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[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (10 children)

Seconding this. For starters, when tempted to go for Raid5, go for Raid6 instead. I've had drives fail in Raid5, and in turn have a second failure during the increased I/O associated with replacing a failed drive.

And yes, setting up RAID wipes the drives. Is the data private? If not, a friendly datahoarder might help you out with temporary storage.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 months ago (9 children)

I run RAID5 on one device.... BUT only because it replicates data that's on 2 other local devices AND that data is backed up to a cloud storage.

And I still want it to be RAID 6.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago (3 children)

Wut...

I think you're missing the point of RAID here, possibly. Where's the reliability in this?

[–] malaknight 3 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Not to speak for the person above you. But I believe they are saying they have 1 computer with a raid5 array, that backs up to two different local servers, and then at least 1 of those 3 servers backs up to a cloud provider.

If that is true then they are doing it correctly. It is highly recommended to follow a 3-2-1 storage solution, where you back up to a local backup and a cloud backup for redundancy.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Ahhh, makes sense. That kind of wrecked my brain for a moment.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

Lol, sorry, I really tried to make it clear what I was doing, honest, I did! 😄

Yes, I have 3 local devices that replicate to each other, one is RAID5, (well, 2 are, but...not for long). And one of them also does backup to a cloud storage.

Not ideal, because 3 devices are colocated, but it's what I can do right now. I'm working on a backup solution to include friends and family locations (looking to replicate what Crashplan used to provide in their "backup to friends" solution).

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