Re: Replacement RAID hard drives - do they have to be "clean"?
On Tue, Sep 16, 2014 at 03:03:41PM -0400, Ken Heard wrote:
> One of my boxes has a RAID1 using two Seagate SATA 3.0 1 tb hard drives.
> I need to replace one of them, and I would like to use as a replacement
> a Samsung SATA 2.0 1 tb drive which already has on it data which I do
> not need to keep.
>
> My first question is: although both drives are the same size, can I get
> away with having one drive a Seagate 3.0 and the other Samsung 2.0?
Yes.
> I consequently assume that the data on the replacement drive must
> somehow be made unreadable. Is that assumption correct? If so, do the
> data have to be "shredded", or is it sufficient simply either to
> "delete" them or simply reformat the drive?
I'm going to assume you're using mdadm.
You need to make the new drive have a large partition that is
usable as a RAID area. Even if the drive is already a single
partition, you will want to change the partition type to fd.
> Finally, once I have a "clean" new drive installed, will the RAID1
> copying process partition the new drive the same way as the other drive
> and copy the files without further human intervention?
No, you need to partition the new drive and then tell mdadm that
it will become part of the RAID. Then everything will be copied
across automatically.
There is a faq for mdadm.
-dsr-
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