I'm planning on building a file server, which will help share all of my media so that I can use it on my workstation, laptop and media centre PC. I have plenty of experience with Debian so I'm going to use that. I'm going to have a small drive that I have laying around for the operating system, but for the storage, I'm stuck.

Would software RAID 5 allow me to add drives to the array later, and resize the volume?

I want to be able to have all of my media on one share in one directory, so I don't have to look for everything extensively with a remote! RAID 5 looks like it does everything I want, except for expansion!

yep you got it, no expansion is possible without reimplementation. as the data is striped with parity across the devices there's no way to squeeze in an extra disk without recalculating all the parity in theory, and in practise it's a no go. you may want to look at using lvm, which you can use to make, for example, two seperate raid 1 pairs appear as one single device, which also provides more resilience thatn raid 5 would.

all media in one directory is a shit idea if i may say so. yuck. surely you can have some simple categorizing system to work with? it's only hard work if you do it badly...

A quick Google shows LVM is basically everything I need! Thanks!

haha! I don't mean ALL media in one directory.

I meant:

• \\fserver\Movies
• \\fserver\Music
• \\fserver\Pictures

as opposed to

• \\fserver\drive1\Movies
• \\fserver\drive2\Movies
• \\fserver\drive3\Movies
• \\fserver\drive4\Movies
• \\fserver\drive1\Music
• \\fserver\drive2\Music
• \\fserver\drive3\Music
• etc.

Then all of my media will be in subdirectories of those directories, to save me having to look for everything in 10 different places.

oh well absolutley then. lvm or a very big harddrive...