Why would you ever want to reduce the size of a raid5 in this way?

A feature that would have been useful to me a few times is the ability
to shrink an array by whole disks.

Example:

8x 300 GB disks -> 2100 GB raw capacity

shrink file system, remove 2 disks =

6x 300 GB disks --> 1500 GB raw capacity

Why?

If you're not backed up by a company budget, moving data to an new
array (extra / larger disks) is extremely difficult. A lot of cases
will hold 8 disks but not 16, never mind the extra RAID controller.
Building another temporary server and moving the data via Gigabit is
slow and expensive as well.

Shrinking the array step-by-step and unloading data onto a regular
filesystem on the freed disks would be a cheap (if time consuming) way
to migrate, because the data could be copied back to the new array a
disk at a time.

Thanks,

C.
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