From what I understand, to set up a new RAID 0 you will lose all data as a repartitioning is required, as is reformatting.
Well, lets say I have a 2 hard drive array and I decide I want to add another hard drive. Will this require repartitioning and what-not? Or can I just plop in the new drive and expand my space?
At this point I have no hard drives or RAID controllers, I’m just debating how I want to set up my new media server, so if the controller or hard drives would make a difference (doesn’t seem likely) then what would you recommend?
What you’re looking for is a feature called RAID set expansion. Some RAID solutions have it, others don’t.
If you’re using a reasonably high end hardware RAID controller, it should have it. If you’re using software RAID, it probably doesn’t. If you tell us your setup, we can check.
From what I understand, if you’re using RAID 0, the data is striped across the drives, which means that adding another one would require reformatting, etc.
Here’s a site with some diagrams of how the data is split between the drives for various RAID levels.
The problem with RAID 0 is that it’s not actually redundant; it really oughta be AID instead.
Another version of RAID might be better, if you want more reliability.
JBOD is another option, if you just want your processor to see all the drives as one big one. It’s not as speedy as RAID but at least if one of your drives fails, you’ll only lose the data on that particular one instead of the data on all of them.
It brings up a good point that the controller may support expansion but the operating system may not. There used to be some utilities like Partition Magic that would let you change the partition sizes so that all the data is in one partition. Microsoft may have added this into the latest versions of disk management with dynamic disks. Either way, you’re not going to lose any data by doing this but I’d back it up before hand anyways.
Windows NT/200x/XP supports volume sets (i.e. Seren’s JBOD). They’re more flexible than RAID in that you can extend volume sets by adding any free disk space that you have lying around, without losing the existing data. You can’t extend the boot partition or the system partition though.
Basically I’m looking to rip my DVD library* (about 50 DVDs and growing) to a server and play them back through my Media Center laptop. The only problem I have is storage. I figure I can either set up an old PC with RAID or I could simply get some external hard drives and a USB hub.
So, as for a current setup, I don’t really have one. I’m just looking for a cheap and easy way to store potentially hundreds of gigs of data.
With that said, and after doing some further research I may be better off going the external hard drive route. Seems like it’d be a pain to have to reformat every thing each time I needed to add a drive.
Jeff
*Yes, these are all my legit DVDs, I don’t support piracy