[ale] bigger disks under RAID1 with RHL 9 or RHEL4 on Dell PowerEdge?

[Danny Cox]

Jerry,

On Wed, 2006-09-20 at 15:45 -0400, Jerry Yu wrote:
> I am under the impression if I replace a 9G disk under RAID 1
> (hardware raid by PERC) with a bigger disk, say 146G, the mirroring
> would still work fine. After it all synced up, I can swap the
> remaining 9G disk with yet another 146G. If all this works out, now
> I'd have a pair of 146G with its top 9G used in the mirror w/o
> interrupting service.  However, any way I can use the left-over
> 146-9=137G ?  

	Yes, there's a new on-the-fly RAID resizing/restructuring feature in
the later kernels.  See the Grow mode of mdadm.  You'll also need an FS
that can dynamically grow also.  XFS can, and I'm pretty sure most of
the others can too.

	Do make a backup first, of course (words of bitter experience ;-).

-- 
Daniel S. Cox
Internet Commerce Corporation