Re: [gentoo-user] Unable to expand ext4 partition
On 06/02/2022 00:47, Mark Knecht wrote: If it's a WD Red Plus on the label then it's CMR and good. If it's WD Red without the "Plus" then it's SMR and WD has said don't use them for this purpose. It's not impossible to run the WD Red in a RAID, but they tend to fail when resilvering. If it resilvers correctly then it will probably be OK at least in the short term but you should consider getting a couple of Red Plus and having them on hand if the plain WD Red goes bad. Avoid WD ... I've got two 4TB Seagate Ironwolves and a 8TB Toshiba N300. I've also got two 3TB Barracudas, but they're quite old and I didn't know they were a bad choice for raid. From what I can make out, Seagate has now split the Barracuda line in two, and you have the BarraCuda (all SMR) and FireCuda (all CMR) aimed at the desktop niche. So you might well be okay with a FireCuda but neither Seagate nor us raid guys would recommend it. Cheers, Wol
Re: [gentoo-user] Unable to expand ext4 partition
If it's a WD Red Plus on the label then it's CMR and good. If it's WD Red without the "Plus" then it's SMR and WD has said don't use them for this purpose. It's not impossible to run the WD Red in a RAID, but they tend to fail when resilvering. If it resilvers correctly then it will probably be OK at least in the short term but you should consider getting a couple of Red Plus and having them on hand if the plain WD Red goes bad. HTH, Mark On Sat, Feb 5, 2022 at 5:38 PM Julien Roy wrote: > > Thanks - the drives are new from this year, so I don't think they'll fail any > time soon. > Considering that the WD60EFAX is advertised as "RAID compatible", what's for > sure is that my next drives won't be WD. CMR *or* SMR... > > Feb 5, 2022, 18:04 by antli...@youngman.org.uk: > > Ouch. EFAX drives are the new SMR version it seems. You might have been > lucky, it might have added okay. > > The problem with these drives, basically, is you cannot stream data to them. > They'll accept so much, fill up their CMR buffers, and then stall while they > do an internal re-organisation. And by the time they start responding again, > the OS thinks the drive has failed ... > > I've just bought a Toshiba N300 8TB for £165 as my backup drive. As far as I > know that's an okay drive for raid - I haven't heard any bad stories about > SMR being sneaked in ... I've basically split it in 2, 3TB as a spare > partition for my raid, and 5TB as backup for my 6TB (3x3) raid array. > > Look at creating a raid-10 from your WDs, or if you create a new raid-5 array > from scratch using --assume-clean then format it, you're probably okay. > Replacing SMRs with CMRs will probably work fine so if one of your WDs fail, > you should be okay replacing it, so long as it's not another SMR :-) (If you > do a scrub, expects loads of parity errors first time :-) but you will > probably get away with it if you're careful. > > Cheers, > Wol > >
Re: [gentoo-user] Unable to expand ext4 partition
On 05/02/2022 22:16, Julien Roy wrote: I didn't - I typically use the Gentoo and Arch wiki when I need information, but will keep that in mind. I noticed, on that page, that there's a big bold warning about using post-2019 WD Red drives. Sadly, that's exactly what I am doing, my array is 4xWD60EFAX. I don't know whether that's the cause of the problem. It does say on the wiki that these drives can't be added to existing arrays, so it would make sense. Oh well, lesson learned. Ouch. EFAX drives are the new SMR version it seems. You might have been lucky, it might have added okay. The problem with these drives, basically, is you cannot stream data to them. They'll accept so much, fill up their CMR buffers, and then stall while they do an internal re-organisation. And by the time they start responding again, the OS thinks the drive has failed ... I've just bought a Toshiba N300 8TB for £165 as my backup drive. As far as I know that's an okay drive for raid - I haven't heard any bad stories about SMR being sneaked in ... I've basically split it in 2, 3TB as a spare partition for my raid, and 5TB as backup for my 6TB (3x3) raid array. Look at creating a raid-10 from your WDs, or if you create a new raid-5 array from scratch using --assume-clean then format it, you're probably okay. Replacing SMRs with CMRs will probably work fine so if one of your WDs fail, you should be okay replacing it, so long as it's not another SMR :-) (If you do a scrub, expects loads of parity errors first time :-) but you will probably get away with it if you're careful. Cheers, Wol
Re: [gentoo-user] Unable to expand ext4 partition
On 05/02/2022 19:37, Julien Roy wrote: At this point, I am considering transfering all my data to another volume, and re-creating the RAID using mdadm. You know about the raid wiki https://raid.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Linux_Raid ? (Edited by yours truly ...) Cheers, Wol
Re: [gentoo-user] Unable to expand ext4 partition
On 05/02/2022 17:43, Julien Roy wrote: Hello, I've been running an LVM RAID 5 on my home lab for a while, and recently it's been getting awfully close to 100% full, so I decided to buy a new drive to add to it, however, growing an LVM RAID is more complicated than I thought! I found very few documentation on how to do this, and settled on following some user's notes on the Arch Wiki [0]. I should've used mdadm !... My RAID 5 consisted of 3x6TB drives giving me a total of 12TB of usable space. I am trying to grow it to 18TB now (4x6TB -1 for parity). I seem to have done everything in order since I can see all 4 drives are used when I run the vgdisplay command, and lvdisplay tells me that there is 16.37TB of usable space in the logical volume. In fact, running fdisk -l on the lv confirms this as well : Disk /dev/vgraid/lvraid: 16.37 TiB If you'd been running mdadm I'd have been able to help ... my setup is ext4 over lvm over md-raid over dm-integrity over hardware... But you've made no mention of lvgrow or whatever it's called. Not using lv-raid, I don't know whether you put ext straight on top of the raid, or do you need to grow the lv volume after you've grown the raid? I know I'd have to grow the volume. Cheers, Wol
