RAID 5 Management dilemma
 

I'm looking to set up a homemade NAS with a RAID 5 and LVM. I have two new disks in my new NAS system (300GB and 120GB) and I have two old disks that I want to incorporate into the RAID (300GB and 120GB). My problem is that these old disks contain the data that I intend to store in the NAS system. Does anybody have any suggestions on how to achieve this? I'm thinking that I'll have to move the data off the old disks, set up my RAID then move it back on, but I'm new to all this and a bit green so I thought I'd ask to see if there was an easier way. TIA.

Move the data to an external USB disk first then you can reformat.

Ummm .... how do you do raid-5 with disks of different sizes? I mean, it can be
done, but you're losing 180GB of each of the 300s? I *hope* that you're not adding
all drives to LVM and then intending to split the space into LVM volumes and
raiding those (not that I know whether that's possible in the first place, but
it seems like a horrid idea) ....



Cheers,
Tink