Can Raid 5 be expanded or all drives needed upfront?

[Armornone]

Hi.

If I get a RAID 5 server, do all the hard drives need to be setup upfront or can I start with maybe 3 drives then expand to more drives as they are needed?

Thanks for your help.

 

[thiggins]

It depends on the NAS and the configuration. Look for products that support RAID level migration and RAID expansion. QNAP, Synology and Thecus all support this, but the exact details of what you can migrate to what and how expansion is handle differ. I suggest you download the user manuals of products you are interested in and/or ask in their Forums.

NETGEAR's ReadyNASes take a different approach. They use a proprietary X-RAID / X-RAID2 technology that allows you to expand storage as needed without having to futz with RAID levels.

Be warned, however, that "live" RAID migration and expansion are very time-consuming. For Terabyte-sized volumes and with files constantly changing it can take day(s) to complete the process.

 

[Armornone]

Thank you for the very response. This issue has always been kind of tricky.

Is there any particular RAID card that you would recommend or say to avoid at all cost?

For some reason, my hard drives seem to lose the data on them. They don't fail as in mechanical failure but rather the entire hard drives shows up as un-formatted for no reason(Especially on Maxtor drives). I keep losing data and I really need it protected.

I am hoping 1 large centralized storage will help keep the data safe and help organize the data a little better.

Please let me know your thoughts, Thanks for your help.

 

[thiggins]

Sorry, but I can't recommend any RAID cards. For the one system where I run RAID 0 (my NAS test system) I use the built-in Intel RAID.

 

[Armornone]

Hi.

what operating system do you use?

So your intel processor has a built in raid?

Is there a software you buy to use that or is that built into the Intel chip already?

Thanks

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

I've done expansion on some servers....true servers, not NAS boxes. As mentioned above, it depends on the RAID controller..and what it supports. You can replace drivers with larger ones....1 by 1, or add drives to the array. I've done the "replace drives 1 by 1" method a few times. Yank 1 drive, replace with a larger one. Allow the RAID a day to rebuild...then replace the 2nd drive with a larger one...allow a day to rebuild...repeat for the 3rd drive.

Now you can expand your RAID array to encompass all the new free space. Once that's done...your OS still will not be using that extra free space...so you need to turn to a 3rd party partition manager to expand your OS's volume(s).