GA-880GA-UD3H how to add More Disk to Raid 5

[markgdb]

Hello I Hope you can Help please

I have  6 x 2TB SATA drives but 5 of them contain data
And a AMD AM3 Gigabyte GA-880GA-UD3H MOBO

I want to build a new server with Raid 1 for system I will l use two 500GB Drives connected to the 2 x SATA 3Gb/s connectors

But to avoid having to back up all the dataon the 2 TB Drives  I would like to start with as Few Drives as possible for the  Data volume and then add in additional drives as I free them up by copying the data onto the new Raid partition
The 6 2TB drives will eventually all connect to the 6 x SATA 6Gb/s connectors Raid 5

Is there any way I can start with just 1 disk then add a second ie stripe  then a third etc and then when I add the 6th disk make it Raid 5

Or do I need to create the raid 5 set with all 6 disks before I can add any data to it.
if this is not possible can I use three disks Raid 5 than add the other three disks one by one to increase the size  from 3 to 6 disk raid set.
i plan to Build a NAS media server using Fedora 14  and AMAHI so if possible i would like to manage the array through Linux
also is it possible to start with just 1 system disk on the SATA 3Gb/s connector and then mirror it at a later date without losing the data ?
Thanks in advance

Mark
 

[F5BJR]

*
I think best is to post your request to the Fedora Forum

Pierre

[autotech]

When you set up a raid 0 you use both disk then later you can add a raid 1 + 0 by adding 2 more drives. If at this point you add another hard drive as long as it isnt connected to the raid 0 or raid 1 you can do it i dont know if it will turn out as a raid 5 or a jbod. I hope this below will help you.

A RAID 5 uses block-level striping with parity data distributed across all member disks. RAID 5 has achieved popularity because of its low cost of redundancy. This can be seen by comparing the number of drives needed to achieve a given capacity. For an array of n drives, with Smin being the size of the smallest disk in the array, other RAID levels, which yield redundancy, give only a storage capacity of Smin (for RAID 1), or (for RAID 1+0). In RAID 5, the yield is . For example, four 1 TB drives can be made into a 1 TB redundant array under RAID 1 or 2 TB under RAID 1+0, but the same four drives can be used to build a 3 TB array under RAID 5. Although RAID 5 may be implemented in a disk controller, some have hardware support for parity calculations (hardware RAID cards with onboard processors) while some use the main system processor (a form of software RAID in vendor drivers for inexpensive controllers). Many operating systems also provide software RAID support independently of the disk controller, such as Windows Dynamic Disks, Linux mdadm, or RAID-Z. A minimum of three disks is required for a complete RAID 5 configuration. In some implementations a degraded RAID 5 disk set can be made (three disk set of which only two are online), while mdadm supports a fully functional (non-degraded) RAID 5 setup with two disks - which function as a slow RAID-1, but can be expanded with further volumes

[markgdb]

Hi sorry i have been away
please let me clarify my question.
I understand the diferance between JOBD and raid 5
question is about the raid controller on the MOBO
not about Linix

i just want to know if there is a way i can start with one 2TB disk
save some data on it. than expand the array to 2 disks. save some more data then expand the array to three disks etc
i know i need to have at least three disks to have raid 5
im trying to avoid haveing to empty all 6 disks to prebuild the raid set as i dont have anyware to store the data
my ideal end result will be 6 disks raid 5 but by adding them one at a time
is this possable ??

[Aussie Allan]

   Mark......and welcome

    This is the short version of what could be a very long post...............NO! but sort of!........what you are talking about is Online RAID capacity expansion............here is a read to get your head around it.........http://forum.qnap.com/viewtopic.php?p=166927  Make sure you click on the blue.....Online RAID capacity expansion  in the text body.

  Slightly longer!..........every time you clone/copy data ..... there's risk ...... do it multiple times......More risk!.......the way you're thinking of doing it is doubly bad..........Think of it as a series of bridges you want to cross...........every time you get to the next bridge, you have to burn the bride behind you to get to the next one..........what happens if you have a catastrophic failure at bridge 3 ..........We'll call this the "Titanic Method" for easy referral.

  At days end what your trying to do is set up a stable, clean Raid 5 system to copy your data to "ONCE"

  If you can't afford your own multi-TB Backup system for the final install ..........here is some alternatives..........

 Buy yourself a big temporary chunk of "Cloud" online storage and copy your data across for safe storage..........

 2)  Compress and Burn all your data to high capacity Blueray or DVD as ISO image files................................

 3) Compress all your data and see if you can fit it onto a single 2TB drive.....( I don't know how much data were talking about)

 No good buiding a whopping great server/storage array if you loose all your data along the way.

  Aussie Allan

[autotech]

I think Aussie said it all i do know everytime i try to add to my array it wants to wipe the info off all disk.  I have burnt the bridge behind me once and dont plan on doing it again.  So in short do it right the first time and you wont have to worry about it.