Removing RAID 5 HDD

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IInuyasha74

IInuyasha74

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May 1, 2013
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Hello,

So here is what is happening. I set up a RAID 5 for data protection encase an HDD would fail, but that has had rather poor performance and everyone seems to agree that its a very bad backup, most calling it no backup at all (feel that is going a little too far), but regardless I am migrating away from the RAID 5 array.

I have the following HDDs in use:
2x2TB WD Green
1x2TB Samsung
1x3TB WD SE

I just spent the last four days letting my system enable NTFS compression to compact things down, that saved me a good 350GB of space. My plan is to in the end break the RAID 5 array, pull the two WD Green HDDs out of my system and use them as backups sitting outside of the PC. I know when I break the RAID 5 array that all data will be lost between the drives, so I am currently backing up everything to external HDD drives.

My question is, would pulling just one of the WD Green drives now result in the RAID 5 to crash or loose data? If not, I need to copy things onto my external HDDs, then copy 1TB of data to other PCs I own, so the external is free and I can copy data off of it again. So it would save significant amounts of time to be able to go ahead and pull one of the WD green HDDs now.
 
Solution
J
Yes it should work. The array will be degraded, but no data will be lost and you can still access all data from it.

In that state however it it vulnerable to any further disk failure. It's a risk, so if you have any important data on there that you absolutely cannot afford to loose, make sure that is backed up somewhere else.
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J

JoakimL

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May 18, 2013
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Yes it should work. The array will be degraded, but no data will be lost and you can still access all data from it.

In that state however it it vulnerable to any further disk failure. It's a risk, so if you have any important data on there that you absolutely cannot afford to loose, make sure that is backed up somewhere else.
 
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Solution
IInuyasha74

IInuyasha74

Splendid
May 1, 2013
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See that is what I was hoping is it would just see it as the single drive failure and continue working normally. Its mostly a large video collection, so its nothing that is like I could never get it back. Just would take a long time and be quite a pain to get back on the HDDs.

So thanks guys, I will give that a try and hope it works fine once I finish loading up the externals, so all my actual work, video editing stuff, and a good bit of other stuff will already be backed up for sure, and only 1TB left to copy.

Quick question, it just occurred to me that I might run the HDDs I leave inside of my PC, the 3TB WD SE and the 2TB Samsung, in a RAID 0. RAID 0 increases performance for read/write and combines the disks to be seen as one. This should work right? If I remember right the disk limit is 2 times the size of the smallest disk. Please correct me if I am wrong.

 
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J

JoakimL

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May 18, 2013
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Yes RAID 0 increases performance by combining the disks, so that any write or read is spread evenly between the two.
The drawback of this is that if one disk fails then all files on the array is lost. Don't do this for important data.

Temporary storage, for applications where speed really matters is what RAID 0 is for.
 
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IInuyasha74

IInuyasha74

Splendid
May 1, 2013
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27,965


I think I will make use of this, it sounds ideal for my scenario. I will have a backup of all data on separate hard drives outside of the system, so if a drive fails, I will lose nothing. So I can have the benefit of speed on the drives inside of the system, without any of the risk. I won't have applications placed on this RAID 0, but I frequently move files between the HDDs and my SSD, and I render videos, compress and extract files, and do copy data frequently on the HDDs also so a boost in speed is beneficial.
 
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