Quick RAID Question (1 Viewer)

[jb2uk]

Hi

I'm in the middle of building a nas server out of an old P3 733 machine, its runnign Freenas which is working fine with an old 80gb ide i had kicking about, my plan is to move the two 300gb sata drives from my htpc into the server and put a smaller drive into the htpc (for the os and tv recordings (i don't want to come home and find nothing has recorded cuz the networks gone down etc)) my question is when i move the 300gb drives to the server and plug them into my raid card if in the future i buy 2 more disks will i have to reformat the previous disks to be able to add the new ones to the array? this could cause a problem as i won' have anywhere to put all my files while the disks format

thanks in advance

Elliot Roebuck

 

[quiller]

I assume you mean RAID 0? I've never done it myself, but I was always under the impression that you can add a new drive and the system will automatically bring it up to speed (figuratively speaking). For RAID 1 (backup, rather than striping), I don't know.

 

[infinite.loop]

Some raid controlers allow do use existing data of the attached HDDs when building a raid. But this option is always risky.

Befor you create a new raid, i suggest to perform a full surface scan on every HDD, to make sure that they are 100% okay.

Expanding an existing Raid5 later with more drives should be possible with every raid controler.

 

[jb2uk]

hi thanks for the advice but in the end i swapped to server 2003 and have all the drives formatted in ntfs and they appear as folders in the shared folders of the server

cheers