I'm aiming at a very similar setup as what you're talking about. Whether or not you put your root on the raid is up to you. Personally, I don't, and I have my raid mounted as /home. Anyways, your mobo should support two drives, and each additional controller should support two drives. Thus, with one addon controller, you can have 4 drives. With 200GB drives, that's 600GB of space doing RAID 5. In my experience, adding more drives to an array is extremely easy, but it is dangerous. It is possible to lose data even if you do follow the steps verbatim, although I've done it 3-4 times myself with no trouble. First, you must use raidreconf to grow the array onto the new disk, then you must use resize2fs to expand the filesystem to fill the array. Backing up during this process is highly recommended! I personally don't use a hot spare, and I haven't had any trouble with drive failure since I got rid of all my IBM drives. I did have a run in with a WD drive that needed a firmware update else it dropped out of the array periodically, though. A hot spare is something to take into consideration. Also, you might look into some sort of monitoring script. If you don't monitor the array, you could lose one disk and go months without ever knowing. Something that would email you would be ideal. - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-raid" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
