Can I resbuild a RAID-1 Mirror to a smaller drive?

[LordX]

I had a RAID-1 mirror setup with 2 128GB SSD drives.

One of the drives failed - thank goodness for the raid-1.

I sent the silly thing to get RMA'ed, and it was approved and a new drive was sent.

Sure enough - it is a 120GB drive. Which I am NOT happy about.

So now I have this system (Intel motherboard RAID btw) and I don't know if I can rebuild the array.

Will Intel's RST allow the array to be rebuilt onto a smaller drive?

Any tricks to make this work?

 

[lcoughey]

No, only to equal or larger drive, but you will only use capacity of smaller drive.

 

[LordX]

What if I use parted magic to shrink the partition down to 119GB for example? You think I could trick it to work?

 

[Frick]

Image the drive with ShadowProtect (or similar) to another non-raid drive, configure your desired raid and restore the image to it.

 

[LordX]

Yes that is what I will do. They are backing up with Acronis now.

I will use two 120GB SSDs, that way if one is ever replaced with a 128GB, I will be ok.

 

[frederick]

The only other thing you could do is build a RAID 01, but this is going to be tricky because the RAID 1 will have one drive on one side, and then multiple on the other side in a RAID 0. But you take multiple smaller drives, build a RAID 0 with them to match or exceed the larger drives size, then place the thing in a RAID 1. Personally though, I wouldn't do this...

Honestly, I'd complain, and tell them what happened. A 128GB SSD is not a 120GB HDD. And therefore, I would want my 128GB SSD that I sent to get RMA'd.

 

[LordX]

Normally I would raise a fuss - but given the quality of the drives I am glad to change the brand for the customer. I will be able to sell the replacement drive I get on eBay.

 

[LordX]

I ended up switching the RAID array to a set of 120GB SSD drives. This way if I ever get a larger 128gb drive in the future, rebuilding the array shouldn't prove difficult - although my solution here was very easy too.

I took out the old working hard drive - inserted the 2 new 120gb SSDs and created a new blank RAID1 array.

Put in the old disk along with the newly created RAID array, and used their Acronis CD to image the old working drive onto the new blank RAID1 array.

Worked like a charm!