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Make a raid 5 with two almost full disk and another one empty (lemm.ee)

submitted 4 months ago* (last edited 4 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] 2 points 4 months ago

It's possible to convert drives to RAID in-place... but strongly discouraged.

Since OP will have a blank drive, they could play musical chairs by setting up a new RAID on the new empty drive, copy data from one drive, wipe that drive, grow the array, copy data from the third drive, wipe, grow... But that's going to take a long time, and you'll have to keep notes about where you are in the process, lest you forget which drive is which over the multiple days this will take.