RAID 5 question

[joelmold]

full context HERE.

i'm planning on starting a RAID 5 array with 4x 400Gb for 1.2Tb total usable. Is it possible to add disks at a later date to dynamically resize the array? Or would adding disks be akin to formatting and starting over?

thanks,
joel

 

[Jeff7]

How I resized my array, based on a Promise SX4000:
Replace one drive at a time. The array recognized that a drive was "missing" and began rebuilding the data. It took about a day per drive to go from 160GB to 200GB drives (switched from Hitachi's time bombs to Seagate drives).
Once the rebuilding is done, there was a total of 120GB of extra space (4 drives in the array). I used Acronis DiskDirector to change the sizes of my partitions to fill the extra space.

The rebuilding process depends on your controller.
So yes, assuming that your array is supported, you should be able to resize your partitions after the array has finished assimilating the new drives.

 

[Some1ne]

Is it possible to add disks at a later date to dynamically resize the array? Or would adding disks be akin to formatting and starting over?

Depends on your RAID controller, mostly. Some support adding new disks to an array and/or migrating between RAID levels, and some do not. If you're concerned, you may want to check the controller docs and see what they say.

 

[joelmold]

thanks for the very helpful responses.

actually now that I'm looking into it more, it seems like a *lot* of people are saying software RAID is more than enough for a home file server, especially since I'll have a moderately fast CPU (P3 1GHz) and only one user accessing the data. Any thoughts? I'm going to read up on the FreeNAS software RAID documentation in the mean time.

 

[joelmold]

one important consideration I should have mentioned is cost-- most "good" RAID 5 controllers I can find are $200+, and that's really more than I want to spend. Software RAID may solve this...