add new drives to raid 5 soft raid

[Technomancer__]

if I do a raid 5 softraid (parity mode) can I add another drive later on?

 

I plan on adding 3 drives and adding more later. I will be using hard drive sentinel to monitor drives and sent notification if something is about to fail or has failed.

 

if you know a better way than doing it thru windows like another software fell free to suggest it.

[dalekphalm]

12 hours ago, Ethocreeper said:

if I do a raid 5 softraid (parity mode) can I add another drive later on?

 

I plan on adding 3 drives and adding more later. I will be using hard drive sentinel to monitor drives and sent notification if something is about to fail or has failed.

 

if you know a better way than doing it thru windows like another software fell free to suggest it.

That entirely depends on what software you use to do Software RAID.

 

Unless "softraid" is a specific product - if so, I'm unaware of it.

 

FlexRAID is an example of Software RAID that can expand a RAID5-like parity pool on the fly. In fact, FlexRAID can even expand the parity level as well by just adding more drives.

 

FlexRAID costs money though, but it's fairly cheap.

[Jarsky]

mdadm (linux raid) you can.

storage spaces (Win2k12 R2 Server or higher) you can.

btrfs raids (e.g plextor) you can.

unraid (xfs) you can. (though this is more spanned volume with parity)

windows disk management raid-5 you cant.

freenas (zfs) you cant.

 

Avoid trying to expand arrays using 3rd party tools on arrays that don't natively support it (e.g windows raid5) - or you're going to be in for a bad time. I know from experience....

 

 

[Technomancer__]

5 hours ago, dalekphalm said:

Unless "softraid" is a specific product - if so, I'm unaware of it.

1

softraid is short for software raid

[Technomancer__]

5 hours ago, dalekphalm said:

That entirely depends on what software you use to do Software RAID.

 

Unless "softraid" is a specific product - if so, I'm unaware of it.

 

FlexRAID is an example of Software RAID that can expand a RAID5-like parity pool on the fly. In fact, FlexRAID can even expand the parity level as well by just adding more drives.

 

FlexRAID costs money though, but it's fairly cheap.

thanks very much Transparent RAID was what i was looking for

i will do the trial and if i like it and works fine i will get the unlimited license its only 88 euros

[dalekphalm]

9 hours ago, Ethocreeper said:

thanks very much Transparent RAID was what i was looking for

i will do the trial and if i like it and works fine i will get the unlimited license its only 88 euros

I don't currently use it anymore (I went ZFS and FreeNAS) but I have a full license to FlexRAID too - it was kickass for what I needed at the time.

 

FlexRAID also allows you to combine drives of multiple sizes into virtual drives (Eg: You have 4x 3TB drives, 1x 2TB, and 2x 500GB - you can combine the 2TB and 500GB drives into a virtual 3TB drive, giving you 5x 3TB drives).

 

It's - as the name suggests - very flexible.

[Nikolithebear]

16 hours ago, Jarsky said:

mdadm (linux raid) you can.

storage spaces (Win2k12 R2 Server or higher) you can.

btrfs raids (e.g plextor) you can.

unraid (xfs) you can. (though this is more spanned volume with parity)

windows disk management raid-5 you cant.

freenas (zfs) you cant.

 

Avoid trying to expand arrays using 3rd party tools on arrays that don't natively support it (e.g windows raid5) - or you're going to be in for a bad time. I know from experience....

 

 

You inadvertently solved and issue I've been having for quiet some time now.  Thanks! 

[Technomancer__]

 

On 19/06/2017 at 10:43 PM, dalekphalm said:

I don't currently use it anymore (I went ZFS and FreeNAS) but I have a full license to FlexRAID too - it was kickass for what I needed at the time.

 

FlexRAID also allows you to combine drives of multiple sizes into virtual drives (Eg: You have 4x 3TB drives, 1x 2TB, and 2x 500GB - you can combine the 2TB and 500GB drives into a virtual 3TB drive, giving you 5x 3TB drives).

 

It's - as the name suggests - very flexible.

flexraid is just what i needed but theres just one issue. it wont speed things up with multiple drives like raid 5

so i think i will run freenas on a vm and raid 5 from there

 

thanks for the help 

[dalekphalm]

12 minutes ago, Ethocreeper said:

 

flexraid is just what i needed but theres just one issue. it wont speed things up with multiple drives like raid 5

so i think i will run freenas on a vm and raid 5 from there

 

thanks for the help 

Indeed FlexRAID gives you zero performance increases over individual drives - by design - because each drive is still formatted as NTFS and works independently of the rest of the pool. 

 

FreeNAS is great, assuming you have all identical drives. If you don't have identical drives, it can be a real pain in the ass. 

[Technomancer__]

8 hours ago, dalekphalm said:

Indeed FlexRAID gives you zero performance increases over individual drives - by design - because each drive is still formatted as NTFS and works independently of the rest of the pool. 

 

FreeNAS is great, assuming you have all identical drives. If you don't have identical drives, it can be a real pain in the ass. 

They will all be those 10tb segate nas hdds