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Make a raid 5 with two almost full disk and another one empty (lemm.ee)

submitted 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) by loboaureo@lemm.ee to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world

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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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[–] just_another_person@lemmy.world -2 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

If all of your data won't fit on one single drive, you can't increase your reliability with RAID at this point. You need at least one drive of a size capable of holding all your data to replicate to at least one other drive for RAID 1 at a minimum. Increasing RAID levels from there with replication (not just striping) will only reduce the total amount of space available from the smallest drive capacity in the disk group until you hit a certain number of drives.

Honestly, if you're wanting to increase reliability for fear of data loss, take a run through your data and see if there's anything you can ditch (or easily replace later), see how small that data set can be. Revisit RAID combinations after that.

[–] loboaureo@lemm.ee 1 points 5 months ago

I can recover all, but the time to redownload will be too long :)