RAID5 Question

J

jadams

2[H]4U
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Mar 14, 2010
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In my main pc I have a 1TB hard drive.
In my server I have 3 1TB hard drives in raid 5

Eventually i will be making the change to SSD for my main pc and complimenting it with a smaller storage hard drive.

When I do this I plan on adding that 1TB drive to the server for a total of 4 1TB drives.

My question:
Is there any way to just add this 4th drive to the array? I'm not away of there being a way but, I really have no way of physically backing up the data on this array. Its just too much.

Other suggestions are welcome.
 
You can depending on your controller in the server. Which controller are you using?
 
Most true RAID controllers as well as the Intel ICH9/10R series onboard controllers (very common) will allow you to expand a RAID array.
 
Won't work, and please reconsider using RAID5 on low-quality FakeRAID chips like nVidia. The only reasonable/decent onboard controller is the Intel one. Onboard RAID0 or RAID1 should work even with low quality drivers; RAID5 is another story as your RAID5 write throughput will be very low with nVidia's RAID drivers.
 
Yea, AFAIK, Nvidia's raid controllers do not support Online Capacity Expansion, the feature you want.
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sub.mesa said:
Won't work, and please reconsider using RAID5 on low-quality FakeRAID chips like nVidia. The only reasonable/decent onboard controller is the Intel one. Onboard RAID0 or RAID1 should work even with low quality drivers; RAID5 is another story as your RAID5 write throughput will be very low with nVidia's RAID drivers.
Click to expand...

Easy killer. Crystal shows an almost 3x speed increase read and write over the hitachi 80gb im running the OS off of. Not bad for "fakeRAID". I'll reconsider another controller when it merits buying one as this is mostly for personal use. ;)
 
raid5 absolutely requires a decent raid controller. ich10r is more than sufficient for raid0/1, though. don't let anybody tell you otherwise.
 
Typically RAID 5 meets its match when transferring over 2 GB of data at a time, under 2 GB you are just transferring to RAM cache and not the drive directly anyways.

So typically on benchmarks it looks good but in transferring a folder of music files or vids it gets painfully slow.
 
I tend to get the slow down on files over 3.5-4gb rather than 2.

In the end this setup works for what I need.

Still have the problem of migrating all the data :(
 
Depends on how much RAM you have ;)

I would just get a buddy to help you store your data during the migration.

I would offer to do it but since I'm a stranger on teh netz I doubt you would trust me with your data. I've got some 8 TB free right now.
 
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