How to increase the capacity of your RAID 5 setup

[dawg001]

Hello everybody,

Im looking to build a NAS for my media files. Having said that I like to get some ideas in terms of how to keep up with the storage demands as times goes.

question:
How to grow my Hardware capacity in my NAS as time goes and as price of a hard drive drops.

Example:
- RAID 5 with 3 hard drives. Based on my internet research, RAID 5 is strong as the smallest hard drive. Having said that lets add a couple of hard drives to the example: 1.5tb, 1.5tb and 1.5tb.

Ebay just dropped there price on 4tb hard drive. How do I go about increasing the capacity of my NAS storage,what are my options?

Side note, Looking to use FreeNAS.

Any suggestions you can provide would be greatly appreciated.

R

 

[HugoStiglitz]

almost all RAID 5 arrays will have to be broken and re-created to change capacity or add / remove disks.

DROBO external NAS's are about the only consumer level devices that can change capacity on the fly without having to distroy (loose data) and create again

 

[9o2]

What is your server type? As I know, Dell OMSA allows you add additional drives into existing RAID 5 array on the fly.

 

[FireWire2]

Most of hardware or hardware assist raid card offers online expansion and 10x times faster the DROBO.

FreeNAS's RAID allows you to expansion also and cost 100x less compare to DROBO

Here is my out line of how to build freeNAS

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/280930-32-storage