Linux or Freebsd Experts

Hot Add Large Hard Drive Arrays to Raid System

[Marcus Aurelius]

Anyone have experience with hotadding harddrives to increase total amount of storage space on a partition without having to delete and recreate an array.

Example a 1tb system of 4 disks in raid 5

Now you add another 2 250gb disks for more capacity WITHOUT deleting the array or partition.

Is this possible with a device like a raid hd cabinet that holds 15 disks.

I want to buy 4 disks and add more capacity as needed without DELETING the array.

[Sharper]

The answer to your question is going to almost totally depend on your raid controller card (if you are using hardware raid) and/or the raid drivers you are using.

Many will allow you to add drives (but not remove drives) to an existing RAID array, but it's not nearly as common with RAID 5 as it would be for mirroring or RAID 4.

That being said, if you are running RAID 5 and don't already have an easy/fast backup-restore strategy, you should really consider investing in one. A second set of disks works well and can allow you to setup much faster access at the same time.

Assuming you aren't trying to hold one single really big file, you could also setup a new disk volume and then softlink the "extra" storage into the same as your old filesystem.

[bakedjake]

The answer to your question is going to almost totally depend on your raid controller card (if you are using hardware raid) and/or the raid drivers you are using.

And the filesystem! Most definitely the filesystem. What filesystem are you using?