I have a live server that is getting pretty close to using up all of it's drive space. It is currently running 2 SCSI drives, on a mylex raid card in a mirrored config (raid 1 or 0, I forget which one means mirrored).

Has anyone had any experience with, or know if it is even a possibility to convert the raid array to raid 5 "on the fly". I know this would mean adding an additional drive, and that is not a problem. What IS a problem is if this would mean extensive downtime for my clients (over 200 sites on the server :( ).

Does anyone know if this is possible? How much downtime should I expect?

Thanks!
:D

Even if the Mylex card supported switching from RAID 1 to 5 (which I'd be shocked if it did) you'd still have the problem of expanding the partitions to use the newly-available space.

I'm afraid you'll be stuck backing everything up, building the new array, and then copying to it. If you want to save time, get three new drives, build the array on another Mylex card, and then attach the new array to the existing card. You can then copy the data from one array to the other.

I've done this many times... not a fun task, but an inevitable result of growth.

That's what I was afraid of. Sounds like a bit too much work to me! I suppose I'll just stop adding accounts to the server. Even if i added another drive, I would only put another 40 accounts on it anyway, so I guess that bad boy is just going to be retired from new signups...

Thanks for the help Travis!