Date: Mon, 26 Jul 2010 16:54:09 -0400 From: John Almberg <jalmberg@identry.com> To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: 1 file system, 2 drives? Message-ID: <4C4DF5F1.4080109@identry.com> In-Reply-To: <4C4DF067.7000801@identry.com> References: <4C4DDA28.4070205@identry.com> <980022A0-7623-40A5-BCDE-4909A721933D@mac.com> <4C4DF067.7000801@identry.com>
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John Almberg wrote: >> 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. Answering my own question... So its a HP 6402 / 128 RAID controller. From a quick skim of the manual, it looks like the controller has to go through an 'expansion' process when adding a new drive. This sounds time consuming, but more or less automatic -- i.e., handled by the controller. Sounds like this might be the best way to go. -- John
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