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.

  • @just_another_personEnglish
    -2•6 months ago

    RAID 5 is a minimum of 3 drives…I’m not sure what you mean.

    • chiisanaEnglish
      3•6 months ago

      OP Currently has in their possession 2 drives.

      OP has confirmed they’re 12TB each, and in total there is 19TB of data across the two drives.

      Assuming there is only one partition, each one might look something like this:

      Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes
Disklabel type: gpt
Disk identifier: 12345678-9abc-def0-1234-56789abcdef0

Device         Start        End            Sectors        Size      Type
/dev/sda1      2048         23437499966    23437497919    12.0T     Linux filesystem

      OP wants to buy a new drive (also 12TB) and make a RAID5 array without losing existing data. Kind of madness, but it is achievable. OP buys a new drive, and set it up as such:

      Device         Start        End            Sectors        Size      Type
/dev/sdc1      2048         3906252047     3906250000     2.0T      Linux RAID

Unallocated space:
3906252048      23437500000   19531247953    10.0T

      Then, OP must shrink the existing partition to something smaller, say 10TB for example, and then make use of the rest of the space as part of their RAID5 :

      Device         Start        End            Sectors        Size      Type
/dev/sda1      2048         19531250000    19531247953    10.0T     Linux filesystem
/dev/sda2      19531250001  23437499999    3906250000     2.0T      Linux RAID

      Now with the 3x 2TB partitions, they can create their RAID5 initially:

      sudo mdadm --create --verbose /dev/md0 --level=5 --raid-devices=3 /dev/sda2 /dev/sdb2 /dev/sdc1

      Make ext4 partition on md0, copy 4TB of data (2TB from sda1 and 2TB from sdb1) into it, verify RAID5 working properly. Once OP is happy with the data on md0, they can delete the copied data from sda1 and sdb1, shrink the filesystem there (resize2fs), expand sda2 and sdb2, expand the sdc1, and resize the raid (mdadm --grow ...)

      Rinse and repeat, at the end of the process, they’d end up having all their data in the newly created md0, which is a RAID5 volume spanning across all three disks.

      Hope this is clear enough and that there is no more disconnect.

      • @just_another_personEnglish
        -2•6 months ago

        The number of drives doesn’t matter when you can’t copy to another. There is no replication path here.

        • @ZeoicEnglish
          0•6 months ago

          You seem to be under the impression that the “buckets” in this case are all or nothing. They are talking about partitioning the drives and raiding the partitions. The way he describes slowly moving data to an ever increasing raid array would most certainly work, as it is not all or nothing. These buckets have fully separate independent chambers in them that are adjustable at will. Makes leveling them possible, just tedious and risky.