How to change the RAID 5 to RAID 6

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aalexandrebeta wrote:

Today I have A RN316 with 3 RAID 1 Arrays (don't judge it was an idiotic solution) to be reshuffled as a Raid 5 4HDD to be considered as a backup when my future RN428 will be configured.

 

So my future device will have 5HDD Raid 6 to be expandable when adding an HDD.

 

If you have any suggestion for that tuning shoot!!

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A three RAID-1 array setup has a lot of overhead, but I don't think it's idiotic.  It offers good performance, and is easier to recover data from than other setups.

One aspect here I am assuming that all the disks are the same size.

The fastest approach is probably to backup all the files on all three arrays first, and then do a factory default with all six disks in place.  Once the NAS comes up, you switch to flexraid, and destroy the volume.  No need to wait for the array to build.  You can then create a RAID-6 array.  You can reconfigure the NAS while it is building, but it will be fastest to wait for the rebuilding to complete before you restore the data.

You can proceed stepwise - note you really should make a backup of all the files before you begin here.  This will take longer, but at most of the data will be available during the process.

Let's call the arrays A, B, and C.

As noted, you start by making a full backup.  At the very least, you have to back up Array B.

After backup, destroy Array B, and use it's disks to expand Array A to a 4 TB RAID-5 array.  Then restore the files from the backup to the new Array A. 

You should now have enough space to copy the shares on Array C to Array A (either from backup or from Array C itself).  You can repeat the process you used for B.

Alternatively you can just rename the shares on C, and create shares on A with the original name.  Then use ReadyNAS backup jobs to copy the files from C to A. 

You can then destroy Array C, and add one of it's disks to the Array A for expanion, and the second for redundancy.