1 file system, 2 drives?

[John Almberg]

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