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Thread: Rebuilding RAID1 with bigger drives? multiple questions

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    Guns Network Lifetime Member #2

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    Rebuilding RAID1 with bigger drives? multiple questions

    Guys I have win7 booting from a 2 TB SSD for my C: drive I use a RAID1 for an E: drive for basically everything else(mostly gaming) after booting. The E: drive is good old fashioned 2TB hard disks. I am running out of space on the E: drive. Can I rebuild the Raid1 using a 4 TB SSD drive or even one 4TB regular hard drive for one of the drives with the goal of using two of the larger same drives after the raid rebuilds itself? I would just remove one of the drives and install a formatted bigger hard drive in the array? Or does the rebuilding process format the drive automatically? I don't want to end up with the bigger drive only being able to use 2TB of the 4TB capacity in other words.

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    Senior Member Oswald Bastable's Avatar

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    I don't think putting one drive in and rebuilding would work, but it's possible it could. If I were doing a rebuild I'd get three drives. copy the array to one of the drives, put the other two in and format them as raid 1, then copy the data from the single drive to the new array. The bonus to this is you now have a spare drive of the same size for the future (and one you know that works) in case one of the two drives in the array fails.
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    Guns Network Lifetime Member #2

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    Okay I found what I need to do. Though your idea with buying 3 drives would be the smartest in case of failure, I'm not too worried about losing one drive and I spent enough money on two 8TB drives on sale today(about 160 bucks a piece, good deal). I erred, my current raid1 uses 4TB drives. Apparently you simply remove one of the raid drives, replace it with the larger drive, rebuild the array, reset the drives to non raid, remove the smaller drive, resize the larger drive as the array uses the smaller sized disk size, then put the other larger drive in and create a new array.
    If I ever have a failure in the future, It will be easy enough to repeat the process, and hopefully SSD's in 8TB size won't be $700 or more, I'd have liked to have the Raid1 use SSD's but the cost and frankly the computer is dated(two Xeon E5-2670s@2.60ghz) 96GB dram and a GTX1070 card running win7x64 , don't want to spend gobs of money on this.
    I'll have twice as much storage for a little more than $300. One of these days, I'll buy a screamer machine but I'm content with somewhat older games and I hate win10 with a passion, as a lot of my older games won't run. And there's my life story for the day
    https://www.intel.com/content/www/us...intel-rst.html
    Last edited by 1 Patriot-of-many; 11-26-2021 at 02:10 PM.

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    A single ssd disk should be able to exceed the performance of a spinning platter raid array. Raid ssd for fun and profit.
    "And how we burned in the camps later thinking, what would things have been like, if every security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain, whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family?"

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    Guns Network Lifetime Member #2

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    Quote Originally Posted by 5.56NATO View Post
    A single ssd disk should be able to exceed the performance of a spinning platter raid array. Raid ssd for fun and profit.
    I'd love to, I run a 2TB sata wd blue ssd for the operating system as noted, but I want redundancy for the rest, requiring two. It be about $1300-$1800 for two 8 TB sata SSD's vs $300 for two platters, I can't justify the cost for fun. Dave Ramsey

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    Quote Originally Posted by 1 Patriot-of-many View Post
    I'd love to, I run a 2TB sata wd blue ssd for the operating system as noted, but I want redundancy for the rest, requiring two. It be about $1300-$1800 for two 8 TB sata SSD's vs $300 for two platters, I can't justify the cost for fun. Dave Ramsey
    newegg is having some nice sales on decent metal (i think theyre now actually glass disks coated with a ferrite layer to store the magnetic domains in, not solid metal like aluminum or steel) disks.
    "And how we burned in the camps later thinking, what would things have been like, if every security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain, whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family?"

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    Guns Network Lifetime Member #2

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    Quote Originally Posted by 5.56NATO View Post
    newegg is having some nice sales on decent metal (i think theyre now actually glass disks coated with a ferrite layer to store the magnetic domains in, not solid metal like aluminum or steel) disks.
    That's where I got the two 8TB Hd's for $320 black friday sale. Been using Newegg forever. Used Tigerdirect a lot too.

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