Useing SATARAID5. Adding more drives to current RAID?

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Max-Powers

Gawd
Joined
Jan 9, 2005
Messages
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I am using a Rosewill RSV5. It has 5 bays for hard drives to RAID and uses SATARAID5.
I added 2 new drives to my existing 2 in the box. I boot up the manager tool, I see my existing 2 RAIDed drives (concatenated) and the 2 individual new drives. All 4 are the exact same make and model. I formatted them with Computer manager.
How do I add them to my current Concatenated RAID group? Also, how would I convert the Concatenated (which i believe is the same thing as RAID 0) to another RAID format?
Right now they are blue in the SATARAID5 manager utility and I cannot make them into another RAID
 
Dude, you have a backup right?

You can't just change RAID type, or expand an existing array with another disk, unless the RAID engine explicitly supports that. It's also a risky operation, any read errors may permanently corrupt your array (worst-case).

Please think before you do anything with your data if you don't have a very good backup.
 
If you don't have a backup, don't start trying things. You may permanently destroy data that you can recover at the moment.
 
I am backing up all my data on some external drives. When i get it backed up I will redo my RAID and add in my other 2 drives.
What would be a good RAID for 4 identical drives with some protection? Would it be better to add another drive? I can have 5 drives in this box, so I might have to go ahead and fill it up.
 
Either RAID0+1 or better yet, just RAID0 and focus on a backup instead of redundancy. So two RAID0 arrays would be quite safe, where one is a backup of the other. With backups you need to automate synchronization so you don't forget updating your backup.
 
If you're worried about losing data you can do RAID10, that way you can lose 2 drives and still have your data intact. Downfall is that you're dedicating half of the storage to redundancy.

Otherwise I would go with RAID5 so you don't have to worry about backing up the data, and still have a degree of redundancy.
 
xnoodle: sorry did i misunderstood? You are saying RAID5 can replace his backup? You know a RAID can never replace a backup? A backup protects against much more dangers than RAID alone, and RAID adds a thing that can fail to the list. Many RAIDs fail with all disks being fine, let me just add that.
 
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