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Removed Drive (Degraded Volume). Will It Balance?
I purposefully removed one of the drives from my RN316 because I am transitioning to a newer server and need the drives. My RN316 now has a "degraded volume." My question is, will the RN316 eventuall...
StephenB wrote:
MathemAddicts wrote:My question is, will the RN316 eventually spread out the data evenly among the remaining 5 drives (given that there is plenty of space on the entire volume) to eventually become a redundant array again?
No.
Well, actually yes. It will spread the data out among the drives of the non-redundant array. It will not re-structure the RAID to use only the remaining drives and regain redundancy (and lose capacity), which is what StephenB thinks you really mean (and you probably do).
MathemAddicts wrote:
My question is, will the RN316 eventually spread out the data evenly among the remaining 5 drives (given that there is plenty of space on the entire volume) to eventually become a redundant array again?
No.
MathemAddicts wrote:
Or, is there a way I can force this?
It can be done with SSH, and there are some posts here that outline the process.
It's not something you should attempt w/o a full backup of the files.
StephenB wrote:
MathemAddicts wrote:My question is, will the RN316 eventually spread out the data evenly among the remaining 5 drives (given that there is plenty of space on the entire volume) to eventually become a redundant array again?
No.
Well, actually yes. It will spread the data out among the drives of the non-redundant array. It will not re-structure the RAID to use only the remaining drives and regain redundancy (and lose capacity), which is what StephenB thinks you really mean (and you probably do).
Okay, so in any case, the only way to regain redundancy is to insert another drive, correct? Does it have to be a drive of the same size as was removed (6 TB)? Or can I insert a smaller drive (1.5 TB) and still get redundancy? Note: I have only used 10 TB of the 36 TB originally in the server.
MathemAddicts wrote:
Does it have to be a drive of the same size as was removed (6 TB)? Or can I insert a smaller drive (1.5 TB) and still get redundancy?
It has to be the same size or larger.
RAID creates a virtual disk that the file system users. The RAID itself works the same way no matter how much free space there is file system.
FWIW, your data and parity blocks are already evenly spread across the drives (as are the RAID parity blocks). The missing data (from the drive you removed) is being reconstructed on-the-fly from the remaining blocks. That will reduce your performance.
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