few things;
i'm not hip to the latest barney phife shareware utils that may allow
some kind of dynamic raiding bs, but generally, no, you must format
those drive to the desired fs after raiding them so back up all data u
want housed (or hozed) on that new raid.
basic math is that for a raid 5, subtract 1 drives worth of space and
thats your usable space.
so if u have 4x1tb drives, raw space is 3tb in a raid 5.
md (software raid mechanism or watever u wanna call it) allows u to
grow so if your raid is formatted with an fs that allows u to grow,
then u r good to go (lvm will allow u to grow).
On Sep 27, 2009, at 1:03 PM, James Bensley wrote:
> Hey List;
>
> I have no experience with software RAIDs; at work we only use hardware
> RAIDs and I'm looking to implement, probably a RAID 5 set up at home
> for a media server however I have a few questions;
>
> I have three 1TB drives in various places; one is inside a USB caddy,
> one is inside my PC and in is inside my existing media centre.
>
> Is it possible to add these three drives to another one to give me
> 4TBs of space in a RAID setup without having to wipe the drives as in
> my experience which is only with hardware RAIDs, I have normally
> formatted all the disks before creating the RAID? The thing is, if
> that is the case I will need to transfer 3TB of stuff somewhere (I
> have an idea where, if this were the case), make the RAID then
> transfer it all back but I really don't want to do that as I'm sure
> you can imagine.
>
> Also, if the above where possible; in the future could I then keep
> adding more drives and expanding the RAID?
>
> Note: Obviously I know for this to be a RAID 5 I would need extra
> drives but the RAID level is undecided, but provisionally I think it
> will be RAID 5.
>
> On a side note, I cobbled together my new media centre running Ubuntu
> but I might move it back to CentOS, it was originally CentOS and that
> is my favoured distro, but I would rather not now it is running Ubuntu
> happily I'm just wondering, is this all achievable in Ubuntu? Granted
> people on the CentOS mailing list might not know that, but if anyone
> knows that it is all achievable in CentOS then I would move back?
>
> Thanks for reading.
>
> Regards,
> James ;)
>
> --
>
> Ted Turner - "Sports is like a war without the killing." -
> http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/t/ted_turner.html
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