Convert to XFS advice?

I read the thread here what I want to know is if there is a way to streamline this process to reduce downtime and parity checks as much as possible.

Here's what I want to do specifically.

I want to buy a 6TB hard drive and upgrade my partiy drive. (This is as simple as stopping the array, shutting it down, taking the old parity drive out, putting in the new parity drive and recalculating parity right? Will I need to run newconfig at all during this process?) Then I want to take the old parity drive put it into the array and format it as XFS. I plan to run at least the zeroing portion of the pre-clear script to reduce downtime.

Then start migrating my data disks as discribed in the referenced thread... will this result in a break in parity / lack of protection at anytime? Is there only one parity check involved or multiple?

Any advice or ways to streamline this process?

The moment you take your parity drive out you are running without protection, as soon as the new drive is in and parity has been rebuild you are protected again. No need to run the config utility.

What you would then need to do is preclear that old parity drive, zeroing and reading should be enough, it has had some wear and tear while beiing used as a parity drive, thats different then a new out of the box drive, I would do a single pass, but thats your own choice.

Then you add that new drive to the pool and copy over all data from one other drive to that new drive. Then XFS the drive you emptied, etc. etc.

There is no partity break there, you will continue to be protected.

I would note also that building parity does not count as a parity check. You should check it after building it to verify the build.

The only think i would add is using rsync to migrate the data.

rsync -av --progress --remove-source-files /mnt/diskX/ /mnt/diskY/

This allows you to easy stop and restart if needed, and only leave a single copy of the file on any disk at a time so there is no issue accessing the files while you are migrating.  Some don't like the overhead of it removing the files from the source files as you copy, but if you don't it will have duplicates in the array for that disk until you remove/format the source disk.  I think it took about 24 hours for each 4TB drive to migrate doing it serially.

The only think i would add is using rsync to migrate the data.

 

rsync -av --progress --remove-source-files /mnt/diskX/ /mnt/diskY/

 

This allows you to easy stop and restart if needed, and only leave a single copy of the file on any disk at a time so there is no issue accessing the files while you are migrating.  Some don't like the overhead of it removing the files from the source files as you copy, but if you don't it will have duplicates in the array for that disk until you remove/format the source disk.  I think it took about 24 hours for each 4TB drive to migrate doing it serially.

I really like this approach, thanks for sharing!

When you do this in a putty tenet session you better use screen. That way the copy session doesn't get disrupted when you shutdown your PC.