symack schreef op 9-12-2014 22:03:
* Can I change from an active (ie, disks with data) raid 5 to raid 10. There are 4 drives
Dump and restore. I've used Acronis succesfully in the past and today, they have a bootable ISO. Also, if you have the option, they have universal restore so you can restore Windows on another piece of hardware (you provide the drivers).
in the unit, and I have two on the shelf that I can plug in. * If so, will I have less of performance impact with RAID 10 + write-thru then RAID 5 + write through
Raid10 is the only valid raid format these days. With the disks as big as they get these days it's possible for silent corruption. And with 4TB+ disks that is a real thing. Raid 6 is ok, if you accept rebuilds that take a week, literally. Although the rebuild rate on our 11 disk raid 6 SSD array (2TB) is less then a day. If it accepts sata drives, consider just using SSDs instead. They're just 600 euros for a 800GB drive. (Intel S3500)
Given I can move from RAID 5 to RAID 10 without loosing data. How long to anticipate downtime for this process? Is there heavy sector re-arranging happening here? And the same for write-thru, is it done quick?
Heavy sectory re-arranging, yes, so just dump and restore, it's faster and more reliable. Also, you then have a working bare metal restore backup. Regards, Seth