Hi all,
My partner is in the midst of setting up her home business, and has employed me as her "on the cheap" IT specialist - lol!
We've had several pc's running from home for awhile now, plus media players etc, and we've long been thinking about building a home NAS to keep a datastore for backups, media and the like.
Since her business needs are a prime driving force, I'm going to put in a RAID 5 array to help protect against data loss. Have picked up 4 2Tb Hitachi deskstar's for a darn good price, which will give us 6Tb of operation capacity after parity is excluded.
After a day or two of umming and ahhing, I'm starting to think that it will be enough for the short term, but possibly not enough for the mid term. I have a 2Tb drive here - not a Hitachi - but it runs very similar specs and speeds. I'm thinking I would like to add it to the array, to boost us up to 8Tb of workspace.
HOWEVER. It is already full of data. Only media stuff, so non-essential, and I simply don't have the coverage elsewhere to back it up. What are my chances of being able to run a RAID expansion (?), and somehow migrate that existing data onto the raid set, while still employing that drive as a part of the same RAID set? I suppose I could purchase another 2Tb drive, but then this one will simply go in the bin- and that seems like a terrible waste (might be an easier option once her business is making the big bucks! lol!!!).
My partner is in the midst of setting up her home business, and has employed me as her "on the cheap" IT specialist - lol!
We've had several pc's running from home for awhile now, plus media players etc, and we've long been thinking about building a home NAS to keep a datastore for backups, media and the like.
Since her business needs are a prime driving force, I'm going to put in a RAID 5 array to help protect against data loss. Have picked up 4 2Tb Hitachi deskstar's for a darn good price, which will give us 6Tb of operation capacity after parity is excluded.
After a day or two of umming and ahhing, I'm starting to think that it will be enough for the short term, but possibly not enough for the mid term. I have a 2Tb drive here - not a Hitachi - but it runs very similar specs and speeds. I'm thinking I would like to add it to the array, to boost us up to 8Tb of workspace.
HOWEVER. It is already full of data. Only media stuff, so non-essential, and I simply don't have the coverage elsewhere to back it up. What are my chances of being able to run a RAID expansion (?), and somehow migrate that existing data onto the raid set, while still employing that drive as a part of the same RAID set? I suppose I could purchase another 2Tb drive, but then this one will simply go in the bin- and that seems like a terrible waste (might be an easier option once her business is making the big bucks! lol!!!).