Areca Raid - Drive swap how to?

[ALpHaMoNk]

Good morning.

I have been running two media servers for many many years. one is running raid 5 and the other running raid 6. both using hardware raid ARECA cards (so old i can't even remember the models) the cards work without issue. one server is using the HP SAS EXP Card.

The time has come where i have ran out of space and need to upgrade the drives and do not have a way to back up all the data and start a new raid array and migrate back.

Is there a safe way to swap out each drive one at a time until all drives have been replaced without losing data? I recall maybe years back on this forum of some members just pulling a drive causing the said to go into a degraded state and replacing that drive with the upgraded drive letting it rebuild then moving on to the next one. Is this good practice? I recently replace a failed drive and when i replaced it with a 10TB it did rebuild without issues.

What I have tried was to shut down the server and replace one of the drives from the raid 5 with a 10TB drive , but when i booted back up, it shows member disk missing, do i have to pull the drive while the server is still operating? I really don't to loose all of my media since i really don't have a fully logical back. I only cloud backup my most needed data IE Pictures and docs.

Thanks for any advice you pros can provide.

 

[mwroobel]

Is there a safe way to swap out each drive one at a time until all drives have been replaced without losing data? I recall maybe years back on this forum of some members just pulling a drive causing the said to go into a degraded state and replacing that drive with the upgraded drive letting it rebuild then moving on to the next one. Is this good practice? I recently replace a failed drive and when i replaced it with a 10TB it did rebuild without issues.

What I have tried was to shut down the server and replace one of the drives from the raid 5 with a 10TB drive , but when i booted back up, it shows member disk missing, do i have to pull the drive while the server is still operating? I really don't to loose all of my media since i really don't have a fully logical back. I only cloud backup my most needed data IE Pictures and docs.

Thanks for any advice you pros can provide.

Can you do this, certainly. Should you do this, probably not on the RAID6 and definitely not on the RAID5. What you would do (which I wouldn't) would be to shut down, remove one existing drive and replace it with the new, larger drive. Start the system, go into the Areca BIOS and acknowledge the bad drive and add the new drive as a global spare (if you have a single RAIDSET) or a spare attached to a particular RAIDSET (if you have multiple RAIDSETS on the card.) The system will then begin a rebuild which can take a LONG time depending on how slow your card is, how many (and the capacity) drives you have and what percentage you have set for background rebuild. Once is array has rebuilt and the status is normal, you can lather rinse and repeat for each remaining original drive. Once you have accomplished this you will need to extend the Volumeset and then expand the partition in your OS.
Again, while this is possible and can work, it is not recommended. If you get a single bit failure on the RAID5 on another drive during the rebuild your array is toast. The RAID6 could survive that failure but just only, again it is possible but not recommended.

 

[ALpHaMoNk]

thanks for the input. I always feared this method but really don't know of any other way to expand. how would you of done it without having equal amounts of free space available to migrate? I created a hot spare but it didn't rebuilt it just states missing drive. just one array.

 

[Wade88]

You build a new server and copy everything over to it.

 

[mwroobel]

thanks for the input. I always feared this method but really don't know of any other way to expand. how would you of done it without having equal amounts of free space available to migrate? I created a hot spare but it didn't rebuilt it just states missing drive. just one array.
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Ok, you probably don't have auto activate/rebuild chosen. Can you post the complete log from the card, and what is the Firmware, BIOS and BOOT revision numbers?

 

[ALpHaMoNk]

Wade88​

Yes, this is the best option if available, but like I stated I do not have another high capacity server with the needed space avaiable to do so, hence why I need to upgrade.

 

[ALpHaMoNk]

Ok, you probably don't have auto activate/rebuild chosen. Can you post the complete log from the card, and what is the Firmware, BIOS and BOOT revision numbers?

OK, let me boot the server back up and grab that info in Screens.

 

[josborne]

Good morning.

I have been running two media servers for many many years. one is running raid 5 and the other running raid 6. both using hardware raid ARECA cards (so old i can't even remember the models) the cards work without issue. one server is using the HP SAS EXP Card.

The time has come where i have ran out of space and need to upgrade the drives and do not have a way to back up all the data and start a new raid array and migrate back.

Is there a safe way to swap out each drive one at a time until all drives have been replaced without losing data? I recall maybe years back on this forum of some members just pulling a drive causing the said to go into a degraded state and replacing that drive with the upgraded drive letting it rebuild then moving on to the next one. Is this good practice? I recently replace a failed drive and when i replaced it with a 10TB it did rebuild without issues.

What I have tried was to shut down the server and replace one of the drives from the raid 5 with a 10TB drive , but when i booted back up, it shows member disk missing, do i have to pull the drive while the server is still operating? I really don't to loose all of my media since i really don't have a fully logical back. I only cloud backup my most needed data IE Pictures and docs.

Thanks for any advice you pros can provide.

ALpHaMoNk: Maybe you can try the following. I have considered how I will approach a similar problem. I HAVE NOT tried this yet, it is an idea, so please consider it with caution as it is untested. Take the hot spare from your new disk set (I hope you are planning to have a hot spare!) as well as a couple of the new drives, and copy the contents from your old array to them until you fit as much data as you can. Then build out your new array and copy the files over from the new drives. Once this is done, you can add these disks into your new array and expand it to add those disks to the total amount of storage.​

I believe that Areca disk arrays store the array information to the individual disks, not to the controller itself (hopefully someone can confirm this!), so you could even do this in stages if you do not have enough storage capacity on the several drives you leave out of this array.

Examples are great, so here is one: You have an old array that is full with 64TB of data. You have purchased 10 new 16TB drives for your new array, that will be RAID 6 + hot spare, giving you a capacity of 112 TB (7x16 TB) after the RAID 6 information and hot spare are accounted for. Build your new RAID 6 array with 6 of the new 16 TB drives giving you a capacity of 64 TB (4x16TB). Use the remaining 4 new drives to copy up the data in one go to these individual drives and then copy that information to the new array. Finally, you can add the 4 drives to your new array and rebuild it to give it the full amount of storage plus hot spare.

If you don't have so many disks, you can do this in stages by copying part of your old array to the new one, then go back and grab more data until you have copied everything over. I realize this could be a pain in the ass if you have to break up the data you are copying and do it in several goes, as you will have to remove all of the drives, hook up all of the cables etc., but it does allow you to copy everything to the new array without risking data loss (assuming you can verify that Areca stores the array information on the disks and not on the controller). Additionally, this allows you to copy the data to the new array and leave the old array completely intact as a backup in case anything goes wrong while you are installing, configuring and copying data to the new array. This also gives you the ability to run the new array for awhile before you choose to do anything with the old array disks, to give you some confidence the new disks are reliable.

I hope this helps, let me know if you have any questions.

Cheers

 

[DPI]

thanks for the input. I always feared this method but really don't know of any other way to expand. how would you of done it without having equal amounts of free space available to migrate? I created a hot spare but it didn't rebuilt it just states missing drive. just one array.
View attachment 516441
View attachment 516442

How much space is actually in use on the raidset? Less than 12TB? Stop screwing around and just get an external 14TB or 18TB, backup the data, then delete and recreate a new raidset. Unless you just dont care about the data. Repairing one drive at a time and then expanding the volume would be a 6-7 step, 7+ day process in that configuration. And you won't get a single extra byte of usable space until all 4TB are replaced with 10TB drives and all the raidset and volumeset expansion fuckery is done.

Your predicament is why I dumped Areca and hardware raid years ago and just went pooled jbod + snapshot raid: Individual drive spinup and spindown, individual drive replacement (upgrade one drive at a time with immediate space increase, and if one drive dies only that drive's worth of data needs replacement with no impact to the other drives like a degraded raidset). There are really only downsides to striping home media data. Striping is an uptime and performance multiplier, not a backup multiplier.

 

[ALpHaMoNk]

ALpHaMoNk: Maybe you can try the following. I have considered how I will approach a similar problem. I HAVE NOT tried this yet, it is an idea, so please consider it with caution as it is untested. Take the hot spare from your new disk set (I hope you are planning to have a hot spare!) as well as a couple of the new drives, and copy the contents from your old array to them until you fit as much data as you can. Then build out your new array and copy the files over from the new drives. Once this is done, you can add these disks into your new array and expand it to add those disks to the total amount of storage.​

I believe that Areca disk arrays store the array information to the individual disks, not to the controller itself (hopefully someone can confirm this!), so you could even do this in stages if you do not have enough storage capacity on the several drives you leave out of this array.

Examples are great, so here is one: You have an old array that is full with 64TB of data. You have purchased 10 new 16TB drives for your new array, that will be RAID 6 + hot spare, giving you a capacity of 112 TB (7x16 TB) after the RAID 6 information and hot spare are accounted for. Build your new RAID 6 array with 6 of the new 16 TB drives giving you a capacity of 64 TB (4x16TB). Use the remaining 4 new drives to copy up the data in one go to these individual drives and then copy that information to the new array. Finally, you can add the 4 drives to your new array and rebuild it to give it the full amount of storage plus hot spare.

If you don't have so many disks, you can do this in stages by copying part of your old array to the new one, then go back and grab more data until you have copied everything over. I realize this could be a pain in the ass if you have to break up the data you are copying and do it in several goes, as you will have to remove all of the drives, hook up all of the cables etc., but it does allow you to copy everything to the new array without risking data loss (assuming you can verify that Areca stores the array information on the disks and not on the controller). Additionally, this allows you to copy the data to the new array and leave the old array completely intact as a backup in case anything goes wrong while you are installing, configuring and copying data to the new array. This also gives you the ability to run the new array for awhile before you choose to do anything with the old array disks, to give you some confidence the new disks are reliable.

I hope this helps, let me know if you have any questions.

Cheers

Sparking this back up - I been so busy that i really haven't had the time to mess with the 2 servers.

Josborn - thanks for sharing but i do not have the room to build a second array on the Controller or Case.

 

[ALpHaMoNk]

How much space is actually in use on the raidset? Less than 12TB? Stop screwing around and just get an external 14TB or 18TB, backup the data, then delete and recreate a new raidset. Unless you just dont care about the data. Repairing one drive at a time and then expanding the volume would be a 6-7 step, 7+ day process in that configuration. And you won't get a single extra byte of usable space until all 4TB are replaced with 10TB drives and all the raidset and volumeset expansion fuckery is done.

Your predicament is why I dumped Areca and hardware raid years ago and just went pooled jbod + snapshot raid: Individual drive spinup and spindown, individual drive replacement (upgrade one drive at a time with immediate space increase, and if one drive dies only that drive's worth of data needs replacement with no impact to the other drives like a degraded raidset). There are really only downsides to striping home media data. Striping is an uptime and performance multiplier, not a backup multiplier.

you know at this point - you might be right on the single drive for the one raid set one server. its a 16TB array and full I do care about the data for sure.

So for the second Primary Server - this process wouldn't work since the usable disk space is 27.2TB and full.

I am looking to get out of HW Raid - and go with pretty much what you have. but haven't found the best solution that spins up just the disk is use and still has parity drive for fault tolerance. What you are using is it called Snapshot-Raid? or is it Unraid or similar product? do you have a link to it?

Thanks again for the input.

 

[ALpHaMoNk]

Ok, you probably don't have auto activate/rebuild chosen. Can you post the complete log from the card, and what is the Firmware, BIOS and BOOT revision numbers?

I know this response is very late but is this the info?