From owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Mon Jul 26 20:30:34 2010 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.freebsd.org (mx1.freebsd.org [IPv6:2001:4f8:fff6::34]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id D48E21065670 for ; Mon, 26 Jul 2010 20:30:34 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from jalmberg@identry.com) Received: from smtp-gw30.mailanyone.net (smtp-gw30.mailanyone.net [208.70.128.56]) by mx1.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id D39BB8FC14 for ; Mon, 26 Jul 2010 20:30:33 +0000 (UTC) Received: from mailanyone.net by smtp-gw30.mailanyone.net with esmtpa (MailAnyone extSMTP jalmberg@identry.com) id 1OdUJk-0007ql-D2; Mon, 26 Jul 2010 15:30:33 -0500 Message-ID: <4C4DF067.7000801@identry.com> Date: Mon, 26 Jul 2010 16:30:31 -0400 From: John Almberg User-Agent: Postbox 1.1.5 (Macintosh/20100613) MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Chuck Swiger References: <4C4DDA28.4070205@identry.com> <980022A0-7623-40A5-BCDE-4909A721933D@mac.com> In-Reply-To: <980022A0-7623-40A5-BCDE-4909A721933D@mac.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: 1 file system, 2 drives? X-BeenThere: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: User questions List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Mon, 26 Jul 2010 20:30:34 -0000 > If you have hardware controller with RAID capabilities, using native RAID is better, otherwise look towards gvinum or maybe ccd; see also: > I've just been reading up on RAID in my Absolute FreeBSD book, and it occurs to me that my client has a SCSI RAID drive chassis that he is using stupidly... It's a 14 bay drive, and he's currently got seven 32G drives stuck in it, configured with RAID-0. This is the original 200G drive I was talking about. It's a few years old. Over the next few years, this guy is going to need lots of storage for his videos. After a bit of reading, I'm wondering if the best idea might be to toss out those 32G drives and replace them with 3 big (say, 300G) drives configured with RAID-5. It sounds to me like a RAID-5 array can be expanded by adding new drives. QUESTION: is expansion normally a matter of just plugging in a new drive? Is the new drive automatically grafted onto the old drives? Or do you have to go through a process like, backing up the data, plugging in the new drive, reformatting the expanded array of drives, and restoring the data. I don't know the brand/model of the RAID drive chassis, but the client thinks it can be switched to use RAID 5. I'm waiting for the technical details, but assuming it can handle RAID-5 for now. Thanks: John