Newbie in Server/Raid storage.

[sze_nian]

I would like to know

1. does maintaining a Raid home server is hard?

2. besides that, can i do like this? when starting, i put in something like 5~6 drives. after time i want to put in 2 more drives, can i do so directly without wiping off my previous data?

3. N i guess that i cannot change raid array after i got it setted n put data onto the 1st raid array. correct?

[azeotrope]

1. NAS implementations should mostly be set-and-forget, and if set up correctly should need minimal maintenance other than when hardware failures occur.

2. A lot of raid cards do allow you to expand the array, but if you're looking toward raid mostly for redundancy and not performance, then you should consider running software raid instead. software raid is generally more flexible, especially flexraid.

3. What do you mean by changing the array?

[sze_nian]

1. NAS implementations should mostly be set-and-forget, and if set up correctly should need minimal maintenance other than when hardware failures occur.

2. A lot of raid cards do allow you to expand the array, but if you're looking toward raid mostly for redundancy and not performance, then you should consider running software raid instead. software raid is generally more flexible, especially flexraid.

3. What do you mean by changing the array?

3. Changing array like... example now im running in raid 5 mode, then after months i felt that i would like to upgrade it to raid 6 or 50/60 (same raid card or etc). is it possible?

[azeotrope]

1. NAS implementations should mostly be set-and-forget, and if set up correctly should need minimal maintenance other than when hardware failures occur.

2. A lot of raid cards do allow you to expand the array, but if you're looking toward raid mostly for redundancy and not performance, then you should consider running software raid instead. software raid is generally more flexible, especially flexraid.

3. What do you mean by changing the array?

There are quite a few raid cards that will alow you to do this. I know that the popular adaptec 5 series for instance allows changing between raid levels dynamically

[sze_nian]

1. NAS implementations should mostly be set-and-forget, and if set up correctly should need minimal maintenance other than when hardware failures occur.

2. A lot of raid cards do allow you to expand the array, but if you're looking toward raid mostly for redundancy and not performance, then you should consider running software raid instead. software raid is generally more flexible, especially flexraid.

3. What do you mean by changing the array?

Thanks. Will try to learn more about raid thingy.