I’d like to swap my spinning disks with SSD drives. I have the new disks and they’re just larger than the old ones. My configuration is a RAID-5 with 3 disks (and one hot spare). Can I hot swap a single disk (HDD to SSD), wait for the new disk to rebuild, then repeat?
I’m thinking that I’d mark down the hot spare, replace it with an SSD, mark the SSD as hot spare, mark HDD 1 as “bad” causing the hot spare to activate, then repeat for the other 2 HDDs. I don’t have a lot of experience with RAID, but did perform a single disk swap once with success.
If this is a bad idea, why? What’s the best way to upgrade?
I’m not sure if this is the right community for this question. If not, please guide me to the right one.
I have a feeling you’d end up with a bunch of big drives with small volumes on them if it did work.
Warning you, I’ve had issues with RAID combining SSD and HDD. Basically I was on an older dell server and I wanted to do mirroring and the bios straight up refused to do it because it didn’t want to mix ssds and hdds.
I suspect I’ll have an issue after reading many of the comments. This is also an older Dell server. My only real advantage is that it’s currently hosting 2 VMs and one is just a test server, so I don’t mind losing the data.
Imaging software is a godsend for that sort of thing. I ended up using BartPE for something like that, and it worked great – it has a free imaging program on it. You only need a removable drive large enough for all your files since it’ll compress everything.