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# juggling hard drives
- URL: https://wootangent.net/juggling-hard-drives/
- Published: 2009-07-02T11:15:43.000Z
- Updated: 2009-07-02T11:15:43.000Z
- Author: Leigh Dyer
- Tags: Linux, Technical, #Migrated-1792830072870, #wp, #wp-post, #Import 2026-10-24 08:21

I finally managed to lose a drive on my TV box -- one of the old IDE 250GB drives bit the dust the other day. I'd drop in a replacement, but getting an IDE drive isn't the easiest thing to do, and the box is out of SATA ports. So, instead, I'm going to build a new array, out of two 1TB drives and the two 500GB drives from the current array.

The whole setup is a bit convoluted, but it works quite well. The current array is actually two arrays of 4x250GB drives: each uses two 250GB drives, and two 250GB partitions on a pair of 500GB drives. I'll be using the same approach with the new setup, with two 3x500GB arrays but getting from A to B is going to take some doing:

- thoroughly test the new drive and make sure it's working 100%
- set up the two 1TB drives on my desktop box as a degraded three-drive RAID-5 array
- set up the arrays and LVM setup on the new drives
- copy everything from the TV box to the new drives over the network (yay rsync!)
- take all the drives out of the TV box and replace them with the two new drives
- fiddle things until the TV box boots from the new drives
- throw the two 500GB drives back in and add them to the arrays and let the arrays rebuild

That should about do it :)