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Sticking a 1TB drive in a 750GB drive'ed RAID-5?

Matthew Rogers

Matthew Rogers

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Hey guys, I was wondering if anyone knew if it's possible to expand a RAID-5 that's been made with 750 GB drives if you stick in a 1 TB drive? I ask because I can now get 1 TB drives cheaper than 750 GB drives and it seems silly to pay more for the same thing. I understand that I would only get 750 GB out of the drive.

Matthew
 
RAID-5 arrays cannot be expanded or added to afterward, one of the downsides to RAID unfortunately. Until other solutions like RAID-Z become available, you're stuck.

You're correct, if you drop in a 1TB into the array, you'll only get 750GB out of it.

KO
 
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Kevin Olsen said:
RAID-5 arrays cannot be expanded or added to afterward, one of the downsides to RAID unfortunately. Until other solutions like RAID-Z become available, you're stuck.

You're correct, if you drop in a 1TB into the array, you'll only get 750GB out of it.
Click to expand...

Actually they can if the RAID hardware supports expanding..which mine does because I've already expanded it once before.

Matthew
 
Matthew Rogers said:
Hey guys, I was wondering if anyone knew if it's possible to expand a RAID-5 that's been made with 750 GB drives if you stick in a 1 TB drive? I ask because I can now get 1 TB drives cheaper than 750 GB drives and it seems silly to pay more for the same thing. I understand that I would only get 750 GB out of the drive.

Matthew
Click to expand...
Mathew, you may want to stick with the 750 GB for your RAID. Depending on the manufacturer, there may be four platters in the 1 TB drive while only three platters in the 750. Fewer mechanical parts... less probability of failure... (at least, theoretically).

I'm looking at the exact same thing for my RAID 0 system drive except I've got a WD 750 black that's unused and to fill out the RAID, the 1 TB black is the same price with the discount as the 750. I'm going to go matching with the 750.
 
With drives so cheap it might make sense to replace all the 750 GB drives with new 2 TB drives.
I did this with my raid 5 setup and use the old drives with a BlacX duet.

Good Luck!
 
Matthew Rogers said:
Actually they can if the RAID hardware supports expanding..which mine does because I've already expanded it once before.

Matthew
Click to expand...

Thanks for the hardware list, I was unaware of the capabilities to expand RAID-5, but it looks like it depends on the card and a lot of modern hardware RAID cards support this feature; learned something new from this.

Good Luck
 
Okay, you want something REALLY interesting. I bought a 1TB drive in the end to add to the RAID. I stuck it in and expanded the RAID. However, it still had 250GB's free. So the RAID card and OSX allowed me to format that extra 250GB as another drive. So even the extra space didn't go to waste! I have another 1 TB drive already in the case, so I am wondering about copying the files off and adding it to the RAID, and then just having two 250GB extra drives. It would be better than having an extra 1 TB drive that's not as protected as the RAID5 is.

Matthew
 
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