> On 14 Jul 2026, at 05:21, Stuart Henderson <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> On 2026-07-13, Chris Ross <[email protected]> wrote:
>> [a failed disk ; softraid mirror ; docs for bioctl ; OpenBSD]
>>
>> Is there a way to replace a failed drive with a larger one, rebuild the
>> mirror onto it, then replace the smaller remaining drive with one of equal
>> size and rebuild onto that? […]
>>
>
> Not supported with softraid. You can't create a "1-disk RAID1" and add
> the second drive later either. Unless you want to get dirty with poking
> at low level data structures, you'll either need to have both new drives
> and the remaining working old drive connected at the same time and
> dump/restore, or dump to external media + swap drives + restore, etc.
That’s a shame. Would it be particularly difficult inside of softraid to
get to the equivalent of ZFS’ autoexpand behavior? It seems like it
shouldn’t be to tell the softraid device to just understand that it’s the
size of the smallest member of the mirror. At least for RAID1 it shouldn’t
be more complicated than that. Then, what the FS layer does underneath
that is a separate issue, but mostly a solved problem for FFS already.
I don’t have enough bays in this system to build a whole other RAID1
and copy the data, so I’ll have to take it offline for a while and move
data around the network. In this case, I’m looking at less than a TB
so it won’t be a problem, but it would be if there were lots of data.
Thanks for the answers all.
-Chris
