But now I’m staring down the barrel of building a new box for holding a lot of media files, and suddenly, the notion of being able to expand your RAID5 array started to sound important–especially when the case I initially intend to use won’t hold more than 3 drives, but I would like to be able to expand later.
As is almost always the case in the geek community, “someone has documented their experiences”:http://michael-prokop.at/blog/2006/09/09/raid5-online-resizing-with-linux/ doing just this. Its sounds extraordinarily painless. Even resizing the filesystem on-line was a no-brainer.
So, the related question is whether or not the Areca hardware-raid card I have laying around is actually capable of doing this–the data sheet suggests that it’ll even convert, say, a mirrored drive pair to RAID5, but that mildly strains my credulity. I may have to actually, *shudder*, _experiment_.
