How to increase the volume of a RAID 1 setup

[Ulfisch]

I currently have a RAID 1 setup with SATA2 of two WD Black Caviar Harddrives. One of them is a 640Gig drive, the other one a 1TB drive which I bought recently as the other 640 drive went bust. I also have another two 1TB Black Caviar HD's which I bought in order to set up a second RAID1 drive to store all my media on. (System is Windows 7 - 64)

Now my question: Instead of having the first RAID1 with a capacity of 640Gig and the second with 1TB, I would quite prefer to increase the first RAID1 to 1TB by exchanging the 640Gig HD with one of my spare 1TB's and then establish the media storage RAID1 with 640Gig.

Is there any quick and easy way of doing this, given I have the two 1TB drives, or is it such a big fuzz that it's not worth the bother, and I just set up the Media storage RAID as the one with 1TB.

Thanks for your advice

 

[TheGedi]

I'm pretty sure for RAID all Drive's have to be Identical. So don't quote me but i do believe the 640GB won't work in a RAID 1 along with 1TB drives.

 

[bremen1874]

RAID1 with different sized drives just results in an array the same size as the smallest drive.

You can increase the size of the drives in use by carefully breaking the array and substituting bigger drives in the right order. This process is always going to be a bit dodgy so a reliable backup is essential.

Just replacing the drives with bigger versions won’t automatically extend the existing partition to use the new free space. This would need to be done as a separate operation.

 

[Ulfisch]

Just replacing the drives with bigger versions won’t automatically extend the existing partition to use the new free space. This would need to be done as a separate operation.

I know, I was just curious to see how much of a fuzz the whole operation would be.

Thanks anyway