adding drives to an existing raid1, EXT3 array`
 

I have an existing healthy raid1 array that consists of 2 750 gb seagate es drives. Works great.

I have been trying to add 2 new drives to the previously mentioned array...

I have followed several different examples as of how to do it but i can never get the drives to show up in my /proc/mdstat file...

pls list a step by step overview of what i have to do... The array is EXT3. So far i formatted the 2 drives and i ran MDADM -add with both the drives, my raid is in recovery mode now.. SHould be done by tomorrow.

Pls help me out. Nothing i have tried has worked.

If you can please list a quick overview of the steps needed to get this to work...

Sorry if i sound desperate but i have been trying all week and i cant get the drive so show the new size of 1.5 tb

raid 1 only uses two drives [well, you can add more, but only for extra conceptual resilience], how do you intended two more drives to work? sounds like you really want raid0+1, raid 10 or to use an LVM group to span two independent raid0 setups.

thanks - round that out this morning when i came in to find an ultra redundant 4 drive raid 1 array!!! just in case i have 3 drives fail on me ;)

new plan - i removed one drive from the array. mounted it as a temp 1 drive raid at md2.

i took the 3 drives and created a raid5 at md0

md0 is in recovery mode - when it comes online i will move everything from md2 to md0.

then we reformat md2 and add it to the md0 array...

sure, note though that raid5 is not extensible. you can't add another drive to it. in a 4 drive setup each drive contains 1/4 parity and 3/4 data. adding a 5th isn't possible without rebuilding the entire array from scratch with brand new parity striping. i'd suggest raid1+lvm myself.

thats ok for now... 1.5 tb should hold us for a couple of months...

next step will be to buy a bigboy array and a promise controller