Expanding D5 RAID 5

RAID storage for video editing professionals or who care much about the speed
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zeroecho
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Joined: 28 Jun 2020, 03:52

Expanding D5 RAID 5

Post by zeroecho »

Hi, sorry for newbie questions but my D5 is my first experience with RAID.

I created RADI5 for 3x12Tb drives, with a view to expanding into the other 2 bays and as I couldn't afford 5 at the time.

I'm now hitting the upper limit after pulling everything off a bunch of other drives and wondering 2 questions:

1) If I were to just put 2 disks into the 2 free bays, would they work as single disk mode alongside my RAID5? Or is it 'all or nothing' situation here? I am still trying to clear out my old drives, so I am kind of in backup limbo at the moment

2) If I were to add 2 new 12Tb drives into the free slots, can I add them to the existing RAID5 without much of a headache? Or do I need to find somewhere else to put everything from my 24Tb then look at rebuilding? (in which case I assume RAID10 would be the better option since I heard RAID5 isn't very safe and don't really fancy a complete raid rebuild if I can avoid it since I believe it will take forever...? These are obviously HDD)

Thanks in advance for any suggestions here!
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TMroy
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Re: Expanding D5 RAID 5

Post by TMroy »

1. yes, if you add two more drives as single drive, they will work independently from your current RAID 5.

2. you can also add the two new drives into your current RAID 5 by "Online expansion", but you need to add 2 drives one by one, that going to take time. If you want switch your configuration to RAID 10, then you have to delete current RAID 5, and rebuild them. That will cost your data loss totally.
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zeroecho
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Joined: 28 Jun 2020, 03:52

Re: Expanding D5 RAID 5

Post by zeroecho »

Great, thank you for the advice TMroy! Given the D5 doesn't support RAID6, which is more helpful in terms of recovering from disk failure? RAID5 x 5 disks. Or RAID10 x 4 disks with 1 x spare?

I'm still planning to do external backups but would really be good if I didn't need to wait 7-14 days for a RAID5 rebuild in case of a disk failure... but according to https://wintelguy.com/raidmttdl.pl it seems a RAID10 rebuild won't be any faster

Seems in RAID5, I get double the storage space
But then RAID5 is slower than RAID10 due to parity management, so a rebuild should be significantly faster under RAID10, theoretically, right?

Another newb question I had is, I got a bunch of different WD disks at the same time, but they have different model numbers, despite being under the same label type. Does that matter much here? I read they should have the same number of heads etc. under RAID10, but how can I tell? Is the label type enough or do they need the exact same model numbers?

Thanks again for helping someone new to RAIDs try to make sense of it all!
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TMroy
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Re: Expanding D5 RAID 5

Post by TMroy »

Sorry for the late reply.
Raid10 is faster, but you get more space from raid 5. You need to make a balance by your own. From my experience, recovery time take like no difference.
About drive model, it is recommended to use same brand, same type and similar capacity drives to create a raid, exact same model is perfect I think, but no one can tell how critical it is.
To contact our team, please send email to following addresses, remember to replace (at) with @:
Support team: support(at)terra-master.com (for technical support only)
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