Unable to expand RAID setup

[Hadcourt]

I am using gigabyte P67A-UD4 motherboard from quite long time and I am having three hard disk of western digit company having capacity of 1 TB of which two drives are having everything as well as operating system and are in RAID 0, and the last one is empty. I want to add my third drive to the array but I don’t want to do the whole setup again and don’t want to lose my data by doing some unguided things. I have just tried these things with XHD but was not able to do the raid setup. So do help me in doing this stuff and with safe measures as I don’t want to lose my heavily worthy data.

[samar69]

The RAID volume setup is bit cumbersome task. The RAID 0 setup is usually opted in order to have performance and to avoid redundancy. In your case what I think is that you should take a backup of data and then transfer it to a new volume and then do the RAID setup again as even if you try to do add the volume to RAID array then there might be a chance to lose data and it may cause permanent loss of that. So better take data backup and perform the RAID volume from the beginning.

[Mindstorm]

Well here I would like to inform you about your motherboard that if you are using your high volume data on SATA2 ports then it is a big risk as I have seen your motherboard model and it his having lots of problems with that ports. So the safe ports that you could use are SATA 3 ports. In your case you are having three drives then your SATA 2 ports must have occupied so it is a safer side to allocate them a SATA 3 ports so that you don’t lose your worthy data.

[Erubiel]

Yes I agree with the motherboard problem of your mode .So get it replaced soon. For the temporary basis if you have the drives on SATA 2 ports then move it to SATA 3 ports and move the optical drive to the SATA2 ports and there would not be much problem with your board. I think XHD won’t allow you to add drives to the current array. I am not sure about this whether you would be allowed to change the type of array to RAID 5.

[Aandaleeb]

RAID 0 speeds read in many circumstances, but also reduces access time. RAID 0 works best for large file reads and as temporary space to work with large files. So if you want to check whether you could add drives to RAID 0 then you will have to check the RAID controller. The term is called capacity expansion online, but you have to consult the manufacturer of the controller to see if possible. So confirm with them about the same and perform it accordingly.

[pddaugusto]

It would seem to be complicated but I will make it simpler for you. If your hardware raid controller supports dynamic restriping, yes you can add a drive or drives to the RAID5. This does not mean it adds that space to the volume. I will get to more on that in a second. If your raid controller does not support dynamic restriping the only way to add disks to the raid5 is to wipe the array and re strip with the extra disk. This means a backup and reinstallation of the OS then a restore from that backup of OS and data.

[Yitzchak909]

The whole thing would depend on how have you setup the volumes. You can add a volume of your partition is dynamic. You can create the tolerant volume on raid array but this means if you lose the volume set pointer chkdsk error system crash you lost everything and hence it won’t be recover again. Recommendation is to take the additional free space and create another partition/volume and use it that way but always have a backup of your data instead losing it.