Thanks Munir. That's probably what I'll do since I want to run badblocks on each drive and that alone should take several days per drive... I was going to plug them into separate machines to do that but I may as well go one at a time. On Tue, 29 Oct 2013, Munir Nassar wrote: > On Tue, Oct 29, 2013 at 2:45 PM, <tclug at freakzilla.com> wrote: >> Ok, so right now I have a RAID5 array I created with mdadm. It uses four >> identical HDDs, one of which is a spare obviously (which is good because I >> had one fail). >> >> Anyway, sincethe enclosure I use can support 8 drives, I'm getting four more >> HDDs (also identical to the first) and plan on adding them to the current >> array. >> >> Now my hopefully silly question is, do I have to do anything special while >> adding them, or does mdadm/whatever know which to add as "live" data and >> which to add as spares? Can I just go "mdadm --add /dev/md0 /dev/sdf1" (and >> then sdg1, sdh1 and sdi1)? Or do I have to do anything special? > > when you do that you will add those drives as spares, you will then > have to restripe using something like: > mdadm --grow /dev/md0 --raid-devices=4 (since your raid deviced is currently 3) > > and while you can probably go directly to 7, or 8 i would recommend > being patient and doing it one at a time. > _______________________________________________ > TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota > tclug-list at mn-linux.org > http://mailman.mn-linux.org/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list >