Hardware RAID 5 - Need vinum?

Tue, 10 May 2005 14:06:08 -0700

I've worked with RAID5 in FreeBSD in the past, with either vinum or a hardware raid solution. Never had any problems either way.

I'm now building a server for myself at home, and I'm creating a large volume to store video. I have purchased 3 200GB EIDE hard drives, and a 6 channel Promise SX6000 ATA RAID controller.

I know how to set up a RAID5 set, and create a mountpoint (say /media/video).

What my concern is when I start to fill up the ~400GB of space I'm giving myself with this set. I would like to simply insert another 200GB drive and expand the array, allowing the hardware raid to do the work.

The problem I see with this is that yes, the /dev/(raid driver name)0 will now be that much larger, however the original partition size and the subsequent slices will still be the original size. Do I need to (and is there a way?) to utilize vinum and still allow the hardware raid controller to do the raid5 gruntwork and still have the ability to arbitrarily grow the volume as needed? The only other solution I see is to use vinum to software-raid the set of drives, leaving it as a glorified ATA controller card, and the cpu/ram of the card unitilized and burden the system CPU and RAM with the task.
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