Win7 partition growing vs NAS

[tucansam]

For about a third the price of the cheapest NAS, I can throw a RAID card in an existing small machine I have (Win7 Pro) and run a RAID5 array. I actually can either buy a new case (like the Chenbro with the four 3.5" hotswaps) or an external case (eSATA), plus RAID card, plus two drives, before I even reach the price of the NAS devices I was looking at. So I'm on the fence, but the deciding factor will be...

Given a RAID controller that supports online dynamic array growth (Adaptec), will Windows 7 Pro allow me to safely grow the partition presented by the RAID controller? If I start with three 2TB drives today, can I add a fourth tomorrow, and then 3GB drives after that?

I don't need all the fancy functionality of the modern NAS's, and I've looked and tested five different linux-based RAID solutions. At this point simply hanging an array off my existing system is going to be the easiest, the cheapest, the least complex, and the most painless. Assuming I can grow the array without losing data...

Advice welcome, and thanks.

 

[stevech]

Why RAID?
Just mirror two drives and do windows shares. And backup to another drive that has an independent file system (corrupt file system is RAID-wide!)

 

[tucansam]

Need 6TB of space today, growing larger every year. No way to mirror.

 

[stevech]

Oh.
6TB must be lots of movies or some such.

 

[00Roush]

Given a RAID controller that supports online dynamic array growth (Adaptec), will Windows 7 Pro allow me to safely grow the partition presented by the RAID controller? If I start with three 2TB drives today, can I add a fourth tomorrow, and then 3GB drives after that?

Yes Windows 7 allows partitions to be grown (extended) or shrunk. But remember if you plan on going over 2 TB make sure to use a GPT partition type instead of MBR when you first format the volume in Windows.

Based on the information I have read about the Adaptec online capacity expansion you should be able to add drives just like you described.

There are a few things you should know about online expansion though. First is that it can take a long time. To my knowledge this applies to off the shelf NAS boxes as well as most RAID cards. Some information I have seen suggests that completely finishing the expansion process can take over a week with large amounts of data. The second point goes along with this. During the expansion the chances of a drive failure go up as all the disks are subjected to high activity for such long periods of time. So basically make sure any important data you have is backed up before expanding the RAID array.

I would say go for it. Adaptec is a solid brand and will probably work great for what you are planning. Then again I am generally on the DIY side of things.

On a side note you mentioned you tested 5 different Linux setups... Any chance you tried out anything with ZFS?

00Roush