Raid disks without deleting data

suitheist said:
I suspect it can't be done, but is it possible to add disks to a raid array which already have data on them without first deleting the data?
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Depends if the RAID controller supports OCE (Online Capacity Expansion) or not.
If it does, yes - but you should really backup first as if there is a problem during the expansion (which can take several hours to several days depending on the card, the RAID level, the array size etc) you could lose all the data.

Having said that, I've expanded plenty of arrays and I've not had to revert to restoring backups yet......but there is always a first time.
 
The reason that I want to do this is that backing up data is difficult and expensive- in order to do so you always need an equivalent quantity of backup storage space to that which you actually make use of routinely. So in order to expand a 4tb nas drive, i need an additional 4tb for backup purposes, as well as the capacity i would be adding through new drives to the array. Given that some of the disks in the array are already being used for data redundancy, this represents a painful waste of capacity.

I'm tempted to ditch raid entirely and just keep all my disks seperate with data evenly distributed across them; that way a disk failure, whilst an irritation, is still only a portion of my overall media library, and I get to keep all the capacity of my disks. In any case, this kind of data isn't vital, it's just a pain to restore when lost.
 
^That's what I do, I keep multiple copies of my data on large disks.

After all, if your raid controller breaks, you essentially lose everything, until you can rebuild/restore the raid. More of a pain than having to deal with one dead drive.

In the home environment, raid isn't viable, unless you have a good backup routine in place.


I rather just use robocopy to keep all backup drives current.
 
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