>
> I saw the post around May that stated that adding drives to an existing
> RAID5 array is still not possible. Is there anyone working on this? Has
> there been any progress made whatsoever? We'd really like to be able to do
> this (for obvious reasons).
>
> What good alternatives are there to RAID5, if this is not extendable,
> that:
> * Allow extendability
Hardware raid, the IBM serveraid ips, has tools under linux to add
drives on the fly,
you might want to wait on the ips driver it is a little raw since it,
is so new, and not all of the features have been fully tested under
high load.
I belive that when I played with the dpt you could add drives, via dos.
also would realy should have a DLT tape drive,
so you can back up to
tape, then nuke the array add more drives , restore from tape
with this model you can use what ever raid you want, but you will
cost you down time.
RAID != BackUPS
if dumb user rm -rf his world raid does not buy you a thing
If it were me I would have the array as large as my biggest tape Drive,
DLT 35G uncompressed / 70G compressed, yes you can span over a few
tapes, this requires more work on your part, not so much as the cmd to
make it so,
but the storage of the tapes, the need for 2 time the number of tapes,
etc, more head aches, been there done that.
> * Provide redundancy
that is what raid is all about
also so you need to have tapes
> * Provide speed
Software raid 5, seems to be the fastest with the new kni stuff
