Topic: adding 2 hard drives to system

[muzzy]

hi folks

i need a little help either info or location of info.

i am building a sme server to replace my old nas new server will have 2 x 750 gig drives first once its running i will tranfer stuff from nas to new server then once the nas drives are empty (2x 1 tb drives) i want to add them to the sme server also maybe add 2 x 2tbs also i have seen plenty of info on adding one hard drive but not to add 2 i get that one will be a clone of the other in the raid but how do i go about setting that up??

any help would be great

Andy

[christian]

Assuming you are adding the two drives to the server directly then the following link is the appropriate How-to:
http://wiki.contribs.org/AddExtraHardDisk

[muzzy]

thanks for that

[muzzy]

just need a little more help. the above server configuration can I use 3 different sized drives in a raid 5?? what I would like is a raid 5 or 6 but also have lvm on the drives but I have read that all the drives must be the same size. if its not possible then can anyone suggest how I can set up my server using the maximum drive sizes but yet still retain my redundancy?

[Stefano]

just need a little more help. the above server configuration can I use 3 different sized drives in a raid 5?? what I would like is a raid 5 or 6 but also have lvm on the drives but I have read that all the drives must be the same size. if its not possible then can anyone suggest how I can set up my server using the maximum drive sizes but yet still retain my redundancy?

you can't

raid will be created with the size of the smaller disk

an example: 3hd, 250,320 and 500 GB

if you install SME with raid5, you'll get a (about) 500 GB array (250*(3-1))
so the first disk will be fully user, the second will ahave abot 70 Gb of free space and the third about 250..
you can, teorically, create a second raid1 array using the free space in the second hd, but IMHO your best choice is to buy 3 new hd of the same size

[muzzy]

i thought that was going to be the case makes it a bit of a pain but i am sure i can work around it. so if i started with say 2 x 250gig and from what i have read sme will make this a raid 1 but if i in the future add another 2 will sme upgrade to raid 5 or would it be best to start with 3 x 250gig and make it use raid 5 straight off?

[Stefano]

you can't upgrade from raid1 to raid5 with software raid.. you have to backup, install, restore

[muzzy]

thanks

that's straighten stuff out a bit for me