John Almberg wrote:
If you have hardware controller with RAID capabilities, using native
RAID is better, otherwise look towards gvinum or maybe ccd; see also:
I've just been reading up on RAID in my Absolute FreeBSD book, and it
occurs to me that my client has a SCSI RAID drive chassis that he is
using stupidly...
It's a 14 bay drive, and he's currently got seven 32G drives stuck in
it, configured with RAID-0. This is the original 200G drive I was
talking about. It's a few years old.
Over the next few years, this guy is going to need lots of storage for
his videos.
After a bit of reading, I'm wondering if the best idea might be to
toss out those 32G drives and replace them with 3 big (say, 300G)
drives configured with RAID-5. It sounds to me like a RAID-5 array can
be expanded by adding new drives.
QUESTION: is expansion normally a matter of just plugging in a new
drive? Is the new drive automatically grafted onto the old drives? Or
do you have to go through a process like, backing up the data,
plugging in the new drive, reformatting the expanded array of drives,
and restoring the data.
I don't know the brand/model of the RAID drive chassis, but the client
thinks it can be switched to use RAID 5. I'm waiting for the technical
details, but assuming it can handle RAID-5 for now.
Answering my own question...
So its a HP 6402 / 128 RAID controller. From a quick skim of the manual,
it looks like the controller has to go through an 'expansion' process
when adding a new drive. This sounds time consuming, but more or less
automatic -- i.e., handled by the controller.
Sounds like this might be the best way to go.
-- John
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