Is it still viable to get the "RAID6 key" for my RAID card? Can I convert a RAID5 to a 6?

[Cyber Akuma]

So, years ago I bought an IBM 46M0916 ServeRAID M5014 that I then flashed back to it's original LSI 9260-8i. That card hasn't had it's firmware updated in years so it's more or less on it's latest firmware and has been running a RAID5 for years.

Anyway, the card supports up to RAID5, but to get RAID6 you needed to purchase a "key" that was a physical dongle that plugs into the card. It appears to be more or less a very simple circuit that authenticates something. Anyway, is it still viable to find this key on ebay or cdw or any sort of retailer? I have no idea how this worked, did you need to have some kind of account or something to register/activate it or whatever.... or do you just simply plug it into the card and it works? And if so, do I have to worry about fakes? I have no idea if there is any market of bootlegs of these things or not, and I am worried about if there could be any potential risk that the card detects a fake key and locks me out or damaged the raid or something.

And my second question is, if I do ahead and get a valid key, can I convert my existing RAID5 to RAID6? Or would doing that wipe it? To clarify, yes, I am of course going to make a backup before I attempt this regardless, but I would like to know if a conversion like this without data loss is possible, or if it's not possible to convert it from 5 to 6 without basically deleting the array and rebuilding it.

 

[ND40oz]

LSI MegaRAID supports moving from RAID 5 to 6, shouldn't be an issue to just go in and migrate it. To test, you can migrate RAID 5 to 0, obviously don't click the apply button, but it should let you at least run through the setup of it to make sure any migration process is possible for your setup.

 

[likeman]

So, years ago I bought an IBM 46M0916 ServeRAID M5014 that I then flashed back to it's original LSI 9260-8i. That card hasn't had it's firmware updated in years so it's more or less on it's latest firmware and has been running a RAID5 for years.

Anyway, the card supports up to RAID5, but to get RAID6 you needed to purchase a "key" that was a physical dongle that plugs into the card. It appears to be more or less a very simple circuit that authenticates something. Anyway, is it still viable to find this key on ebay or cdw or any sort of retailer? I have no idea how this worked, did you need to have some kind of account or something to register/activate it or whatever.... or do you just simply plug it into the card and it works? And if so, do I have to worry about fakes? I have no idea if there is any market of bootlegs of these things or not, and I am worried about if there could be any potential risk that the card detects a fake key and locks me out or damaged the raid or something.

And my second question is, if I do ahead and get a valid key, can I convert my existing RAID5 to RAID6? Or would doing that wipe it? To clarify, yes, I am of course going to make a backup before I attempt this regardless, but I would like to know if a conversion like this without data loss is possible, or if it's not possible to convert it from 5 to 6 without basically deleting the array and rebuilding it.

the RAID is not a backup is important note here

if your going to be doing a raid5 to 6 transformation really should (have a) backup as you have zero redundancy while this is going on

ideal setup is to have RAID6 first main and RAID5 for backup (as its less critical if it fails you just re-run the backup and you want the backup to have more space then main for snapshot or versioning)