raid noob here

[zak riddington]

hello all, i have bought some new hdds and want to put them in raid 5, i have looked into which raid i am happy with so dont need help with that, what i need help with weather or not i want a raid card, so i have a few questions to ask, can i add drives easily into a raid 5 array with software raid if i run out of space? or will i need a raid controller to make drives swappable? how hard is it to change or add drives using a software controller? i have a z97 asus pro gamer mobo, also its quite a new ish mobo so i may have no need for a controller but i cant find any answers yet, so any help is very much appreciated

 

[kanewolf]

RAID 5 is fixed in size when it is created. There are some RAID schemes which are expandable, Synology's SHR for instance. Traditional RAID 5 will not expand if you replace a 2TB drive with a 4TB drive. Only 2TB of the disk will be used by the RAID.

 

[zak riddington]

RAID 5 is fixed in size when it is created. There are some RAID schemes which are expandable, Synology's SHR for instance. Traditional RAID 5 will not expand if you replace a 2TB drive with a 4TB drive. Only 2TB of the disk will be used by the RAID.

thanks for your response. so thats right, i know how raid5 works i just want to know if on my mobo i can add in drives to the array without a controller

 

[kanewolf]

That would be a "migration". What does the owners manual say?

 

[zak riddington]

That would be a "migration". What does the owners manual say?

so migration is adding a new drive? and i just checked but it doesn't say, it only says that it supports raid 5

 

[kanewolf]

Migration, in RAID terms means several different things. It is used to say you could change from RAID1 to RAID10 or from RAID1 to RAID5, etc. But it means changing the RAID group in some way without losing data. I think to have features like expansion or migration you have to have a hardware RAID card.