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.

  • neidu2@feddit.nlEnglish
    0·
    5 months ago

    Seconding this. For starters, when tempted to go for Raid5, go for Raid6 instead. I’ve had drives fail in Raid5, and in turn have a second failure during the increased I/O associated with replacing a failed drive.

    And yes, setting up RAID wipes the drives. Is the data private? If not, a friendly datahoarder might help you out with temporary storage.

    • BearOfaTime@lemm.eeEnglish
      0·
      5 months ago

      I run RAID5 on one device… BUT only because it replicates data that’s on 2 other local devices AND that data is backed up to a cloud storage.

      And I still want it to be RAID 6.