Upgrading RAID NAS

[vamichael]

Hello,

I'm in the process of building a NAS box using a IDE RAID 5 card (LSI
i4 MegaRaid) and some old equipment I have lying around.

At the moment I am using 4 160GB hard drives. I know that the size of
the RAID disk is dependant upon the smallest drive used in the array.
What I would like to know is it possible to "upgrade" my RAID disk to
250GB drives by replacing each 160GB drive one at a time.

Thanks!

 

[Arno Wagner]

Hello,

I'm in the process of building a NAS box using a IDE RAID 5 card (LSI
i4 MegaRaid) and some old equipment I have lying around.

At the moment I am using 4 160GB hard drives. I know that the size of
the RAID disk is dependant upon the smallest drive used in the array.
What I would like to know is it possible to "upgrade" my RAID disk to
250GB drives by replacing each 160GB drive one at a time.

Thanks!

Only if the controller explicitely supports this. Otherwise you are stuck.
Since you aleo need to adjust the partitioning and the maybe the
filesystem (operations that many people do not know how to do), I
suspect that only very few hardware controllers support this. Linux
software RAID (were it is easier to do) only has had the feature
for two months or so.

Depending on the performance you need and the OS compentence you have,
you could move to Linux software RAID and build a new array in parallel.

Arno

 

[Curious George]

Hello,

I'm in the process of building a NAS box using a IDE RAID 5 card (LSI
i4 MegaRaid) and some old equipment I have lying around.

At the moment I am using 4 160GB hard drives. I know that the size of
the RAID disk is dependant upon the smallest drive used in the array.
What I would like to know is it possible to "upgrade" my RAID disk to
250GB drives by replacing each 160GB drive one at a time.

Yes. It supports "Online Capacity expansion and RAID level
Migration".
www.tba.pt/i4pb.pdf

You would replace, & rebuild, and then upgrade the array. Then you'd
have to enlarge the existing partitions or add new ones. But if all
you have in the machine is that single 4 channel card, IMHO it would
make more sense to simply start from scratch and restore to the
upgraded array from a backup.