Adjustable Raid-5?

[GotNoRice]

Here’s my problem. Right now I’ve got 6 storage drives in my fileserver. 2 120’s, 2 200’s, and 2 250’s. Each pair is in Raid-0.

What I’d like to do is get rid of the mismatched drives, and either get a number of 200’s or a number of 250’s and make it Raid-5. My problem is that every time I change my storage around, I have hundreds and hundreds of gigs that I need to put somewhere and that isn’t always possible. I’m thinking for an initial Raid-5 configuration I would go with 3 250’s. My main concern is that that is 500gigs of usable space, and if I ever wanted to add more 250’s to the array, I would have to find a place to store that 500gigs while I rebuilt the new array. Idealy this will be using software raid in windows server 2003 because the cost of hardware raid-5 is pretty high and performance isn’t really a factor here.

So, to solve my problem, does anyone know if there is a way to dynamically adjust a Raid-5 array, like, have 3 drives, add a 4th and have it automatically incorporate that drive into the array without having to pull all the existing data off and rebuild it from scratch?

 

[defakto]

I know newer raid 5 controllers will allow you to add a drive into the array and will rebuild it to the new size, not sure if the software raid stuff in windows will support that, it's probably a very intensive operation and would suck all your cpu up. Pretty much any newer raid card by 3ware and the other big names will do it.

 

[ambit]

mis-read