Raid 5 newbie question

[BarmyYeTTi]

Im looking to take the jump to 3x 320Gb drives in Raid 5.

But I have a question regarding future upgrade of the raid...

basically, if in the future I wanted to upgrade to 3x 500gb drives would I...

a) have to start from scratch
b) could I replace one drive at a time rebuilding the array after each addition, and after replacing the final drive the array would use the full drive capacities of all the new drives.
c) another way

cheers

 

[BarmyYeTTi]

thanks for the reply, and that was gonna be my next question elfy!

also... just been looking round and it seems my original idea of a SFF raid setup aint gonna work, so its gonna have to be a storage setup AND a SFF.

so another question is:
does the CPU and RAM make any difference to the RAID5?

I am looking at putting a reasonably beefy CPU, GFX card and lots of ram in the SFF, so looking to keep prices down on the Network storage system.

 

[BarmyYeTTi]

thanks for that rpstewart... think my budget has just been exceeded!! bugger!