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Growable, portable array?

V

vr.

Supreme [H]ardness
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I'm considering building a volume for storing random data, email, re-mapping my home drive too, etc., but the prices on drives right now are too high.

This would not be a boot volume but I'm thinking disks hooked direct to motherboard SATA ports may be good enough? And using software RAID to unplug drives and move them to another system without a lot of hoops appeals to me. I've read debates on here about pros/cons of hardware vs software RAID so I'd like to steer away from rehashing that.

I'd want to start out with as few drives as possible but be able to replace the drives and/or resize it to many TB as the prices decline without backing up the data, destroying the layout, recreating a new layout, then restoring the data. I probably wouldn't grow beyond 6 physical disks but I'd want the option to move the array to an add-on LSI card, etc.

I'm familiar with debian but can use something else if the tools baked in something else are more robust but I'm not familiar with the current state of software RAID, if it can fire off an alert that my array developed an issue (like the Areca cards do) or what I should be looking at for maximum ease in growth and array portability.

Is it easy & possible to start with 2 disks mirrored and grow/migrate to another RAID type without an outage? Any recommendations from those of you pro soft-RAID?

The drives I was considering tonight to get me rolling by early next week were Hitachi HDS721010DLE630 (0F13180) @ $119.99
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822145533
 
vr. said:
replace the drives and/or resize it to many TB ...... without backing up the data
Click to expand...

That is a recipe for disaster. You should have a backup at all times, ESPECIALLY before you do layout changes to your array.
 
mwroobel said:
That is a recipe for disaster. You should have a backup at all times, ESPECIALLY before you do layout changes to your array.
Click to expand...

Thanks for your reply. But please don't make assumptions about my data protection strategy. I did not say I would not back up my data. I said "without backing up the data, destroying the layout, recreating a new layout, then restoring the data."

I don't want to have to crush the array everytime it's grown.
 
Is it easy & possible to start with 2 disks mirrored and grow/migrate to another RAID type without an outage? Any recommendations from those of you pro soft-RAID?
Click to expand...

I do not know about raid 1 to raid 5. I rarely use raid 1 for data at work or home. But I have done my share of linux software raid 5 to raid6 at work. My last migration was taking an 8 drive x 512 GB linux software raid 5 array and making it a 9 drive x 2TB array. That worked well and it is the machine that nets over 800 MB/s sequential reads with 500+ MB/s writes on a core2quad Q9550 with 4GB of ram and an LSI based HBA (intel SASUC8I) for 8 of the drives with intel ports for the rest (1 drive + spares). I did / do however have backups of that on my 40TB+ of LTO2 tape (yes over 100 tapes). That is not the only migration I have done. I had 10 or so other raid 5 arrays that I migrated to raid 6 in the last 2 to 3 years because of reliability concerns (increased RMA rates).
 
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