I'm looking to upgrade my storage. I currently have 2 x 500gb drives in raid 0 and a separate 1Tb drive. I recently bought an external raid enclosure and 2 1tb drives.

what I'm wanting to do is to set up the two drives I have, transfer the data I have on the internal drives, and then add the internal drives to that same array without losing the data.

basically I'm looking for a flexible raid setup that can expand to incorporate the extra disks without losing my data. is what I'm wanting to do even possible? I've been searching the net for answers and so far have come up blank. thanks in advance.

No, it's not possible with RAID0 because of the nature of the beast. Since every file is exploded into chunks and stored individually, all the drives have to be formatted to be incorporated into the RAID array. Higher level RAIDs (like 5) with good RAID cards can add more drives to the array without interruption.

I know it's not possible with raid 0, I was thinking of raid 5 but I hadn't read anything or found any cards that said definitively that it could perform such a function. if you could direct me to something that would do the job I'd appreciate it. thanks for the info.

Brad McQuern said:

The magic words you're looking for are "Online Array Expansion" (sometimes "Online RAID Capacity Expansion" is also used). Most dedicated RAID cards will handle this these days. Expect to pay somewhere in the $300-700 ballpark depending on how many ports the card has, the type of disk interface (SATA, SAS, SCSI, etc), the type host interface (PCIe or PCI-X generally).

Here are a couple examples, though I have no experience with them and can't recommend a specific make/model:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816131003

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816115026

thanks, that should help a lot, I knew there had to be a specific thing to look for that I was missing in my searches.