Topic: adding disks for data expansion

[majikins]

Hi

I'd like some advise on how to go about this please.

I have sme 7.3 setup on system with 2 80gig drives on raid1.
I would now like to add 4 disks of 500GB in raid5 configuration and extend/move the home directory to include this space.(keep the data separate from the system)

I've been trawling the forums and my understanding is that you can only load one extra drive and that if you wanted to add extra drives then it would have been best to do this in the beginning of the install?

Whats the best way for me to achieve my objective here?

Thanks in advance

[CharlieBrady]

I've been trawling the forums and my understanding is that you can only load one extra drive and that if you wanted to add extra drives then it would have been best to do this in the beginning of the install?

Correct.

[majikins]

bugger!

that means practically that I have to probably reload system with the 4 disks only!

I've been reading up on lvm - is it not possible to extend the root volume by manually setting up the 4 drives for this?

[CharlieBrady]

I've been reading up on lvm - is it not possible to extend the root volume by manually setting up the 4 drives for this?

Probably. But you'll need to learn a lot to be able to achieve that, which is why I say it's "better" to do something which will "just work". Your choice.

[Gaston94]

Hi,
you technically can achieve your goal.
But you'll definitely be out from the standard configuration, and you need to have the requested skills to support it.
They are many way you can choose, I would say for instance
 - SME installed on your 80GB RAID1 devices
 - add a new RAID5 array from your 4 500GB disks (3+1 spare)
You only have to create the raid5 array and add it to your system, like if it was a new disk (look from point 3 at http://wiki.contribs.org/AddExtraHardDisk ).
If you are not familiar with raid device management you'd better follow CharlieBrady advise and just have server install directly on the 4 500GB, will work out of the box without any other problems
G.