Hardware RAID 5 - Need vinum?

[Tony Shadwick]

I've worked with RAID5 in FreeBSD in the past, with either vinum or a 
hardware raid solution.  Never had any problems either way.

I'm now building a server for myself at home, and I'm creating a large 
volume to store video.  I have purchased 3 200GB EIDE hard drives, and a 6 
channel Promise SX6000 ATA RAID controller.

I know how to set up a RAID5 set, and create a mountpoint (say 
/media/video).

What my concern is when I start to fill up the ~400GB of space I'm giving 
myself with this set.  I would like to simply insert another 200GB drive 
and expand the array, allowing the hardware raid to do the work.

The problem I see with this is that yes, the /dev/(raid driver name)0 will 
now be that much larger, however the original partition size and the 
subsequent slices will still be the original size.  Do I need to (and is 
there a way?) to utilize vinum and still allow the hardware raid 
controller to do the raid5 gruntwork and still have the ability to 
arbitrarily grow the volume as needed?  The only other solution I see is 
to use vinum to software-raid the set of drives, leaving it as a glorified 
ATA controller card, and the cpu/ram of the card unitilized and burden the 
system CPU and RAM with the task.