In the last installment, I brought up the fact that I was trying to save time because one operation was going to take a couple thousand minutes to complete. Let me describe to you what I did.

Based on my original experience with RAID (albeit, with RAID 1), it didn’t take too long to complete, and I could use the file system while it completed. One of the complaints I had in the last post was that I wouldn’t be able to use the file system while it was resizing; I didn’t know that until I went down this path....
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Let’s see, where did I leave off in the last installment? Oh yeah, setting up the level 5 array with just the two disks; this is before adding the third and growing it. We had just started the new array and it was resizing/repairing/whatever. Weeeellll… a lot has happened since then. Let’s go through it.

$ cat /proc/mdstat Personalities : [linear] [multipath] [raid0] [raid1] [raid6] [raid5] [raid4] [raid10] md0 : active raid5 sdb1[2] sda1[0] 1953381888 blocks super 1.2 level 5, 512k chunk, algorithm 2 [2/2] [UU] unused devices: <none> 

This is what is seen...
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So, I didn’t get started with this on Thursday. In fact, it wasn’t till Saturday that I decided to actually take the plunge. And now I’m stuck in the middle of it, waiting for… a long time. Since I’m stuck, I’ll tell you what I’m doing. Hell, maybe later I can just look this up and see what I did if I ever need to do it again!

First off, I made sure my data was backed up. The backup to my external hard drive is complete, but not to online; that will still take a couple weeks, and I’m...
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I’m sure we all have one of those “there is NO WAY I could possibly use that much hard disk space” moments, and I’m sure that for each one of those moments, we all have a matching one where we say “wait… what? 95% full???” Personally, I’m still reeling that I purchased a microSD card for my phone which has several orders of magnitude more storage than my first “there is NO WAY” moment with a 1.44MB 3.5” floppy.

Side note; I HAD TO do the math. One 3.5” floppy is 90mm x 93.7mm x 3.3mm. One microSD card is...
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