0

At the moment, I have a Intel SR2500 with 5 disks running at home. 4 of the disks aren't used at the moment due to maintenance-reasons.

Because it's an expeiment-laboratory-machine where I can try everything, I thought of something:

At the time being, I have no RAID (Except a Linux LVM Software RAID-0).

My disk-controller is capable of creating a hardware-layer RAID-5 at which I'd use 4 of my disks and Nr5 as spare.

Now I wanted to know: Is there any possibility that I can "migrate" my system to the RAIDed configuration, or isn't this possible?

Do I have to wipe everything, create RAID, set up the new system and re-import settings, or is there another, easyer way to do this?

UeliDeSchwert
  • 152
  • 7

2 Answers2

2

Not possible. There generally is no standard for writing the metadata onto the discs, so ever technology does it different. Heck, some years ago you had to wipe between different versions of a raid controller. Cross-Manufacturer - dream on ;) Sadly.

TomTom
  • 51,649
  • 7
  • 54
  • 136
1

Migrating a RAIDgroup across controllers is unlikely to be possible - most controllers have their own mechanisms for handling disk signatures an RAID layouts.

You can sometimes 'extend' a RAID set - adding extra disks to it, and re-layout the data. However that's very much a question of what your RAID software/controller supports. But you may find you can take your existing single disk, attach it to the RAID controller as a 'standalone' piece of storage - and then 'extend' by attaching the rest of the disks to the RAID set.

I wouldn't necessarily expect to be able to do this on a home setup though.

Sobrique
  • 3,747
  • 2
  • 15
  • 36