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Make a raid 5 with two almost full disk and another one empty

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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47 comments

  • Not really with mdadm raid5. But it sounds like you like to live dangerously. You could always go the BTRFS route. Yeah, I know BTRFS Raid56 "will eat your data", but you said it's nothing that important anyways. There are some things to keep in mind when running BTRFS in Raid5, e.g. scrub each disk individually, use Raid1c3 for metadata for example.

    But basically, BTRFS is one of the only filesystems that allows you to add disks of any size or number, and you can convert the profile on the fly, while in use. So in this case, you could format the new disk with BTRFS as a single disk. Copy over stuff from one of your other disks, then once that disk is empty, add it as a additional device to your existing BTRFS volume. Then do the same with the last disk. Once that is done, you can run a balance convert to convert the single profile into a raid5 data profile.

    That being said, there are quite a few caveats to be aware of. Even though it's improved a lot, BTRFS's Raid56 implementation is still not recommended for production use. https://lore.kernel.org/linux-btrfs/20200627032414.GX10769@hungrycats.org/

    Also, I would STRONGLY recommend against connecting disks via USB. USB HD adapters are notorious for causing all kinds of issues when used in any sort of advanced setup, apart from temporary single disk usage.

    • Interesting, i think it will be made for my usecase. i'll check it

      Thanks for your answer!!

47 comments