I run a small linux server at home. Its a box I put together from scratch using better quality components hoping that will last a few years running 24x7. It's been running almost two years without a glitch. The main problem has been that, as my needs change, I need to add new things. My biggest need for the past nine months has been disk space. All I'll say is that I became a "torrentaddict" and the 144Gig of my two WD74 raptors disintegrated in my first few weeks.

Last July, I bought a larger case, bigger PSU, a pci-x 64 SATA controller, and 4x300Gig Seagate barracuda drives. Then moved my old server into the new box with the extra 1.2 Tb of space. Then I created a RAID5 on the 4 new drives, which fave me 900 Gig of effective storage, and then created a ReiserFS on top.

I use my new RAID to satisfy my torrentaddiction, of course, and also as a backup for my digital photos and mp3 files. It's also very cool to play with diferent OSs using VMWare Linux. I have VMs running Windows, BDS, RedHat, Fedora, Ubuntu, MacOS x86, DSL (Damn Small Linux), etc. Nevertheless the coolest application is mounting the RAID device, using samba, as a windows drive from my laptop, and then play the torrents on the laptop hooked to my 50 inch plasma TV using a DivX player.

Now I'm at a point where I'm considering increasing the sice of the raid, since I've filled up 55% of it already. My first idea was adding 2 extra 300Gig drives (since they have gone down in price), then rebalance the RAID and extend the filesystem. This way I keep all my data which, by the way, is too big to archive with my means.

I setup a testcase on VMWare with FedoraCore4 (no need to experiment with my production box). I plugged in a 40Gig drive thru a USB adapter and created 6x100 cylinder partitions on it. Then used the first 4 to create a raid and a reiserFS on top (just like my current environment). Then added the remaining 2 and tried to rebalance the array with:

mdadm --grow /dev/md0 --raid-disks=6

It complained saying this operation is only allowed on RAID1 devices. I dug around and found that this is possibly a kernel limitation (/usr/src/linux-2.6/Documentation/md.txt), which puts a damper to my growth aspirations.