thanks for the great replies
so essentially i want to expand the storage one drive at a time. im perfecly fine with 1 TB HDD. they are cheap now and if i bought like 10 it would be nice to know that i can just add the drive to the raid and have that expanded storage.
so for example. 3 1 TB drives in a raid 5, offers about 1.8 TB storage. i just want to be able to add the drive to the raid, click rebuild, and have that extra space added, turning it into a 4 1TB drive raid 5 without having data lost or having to backup the raid array
how does the drobo expand on the fly, if they can do it we should be able to as well
edit (to add stuff)
to spardas comment, what is md. did you mean microsoft? and also does rebuilding the array destroy the data? i am just frustrated because i have 4 hot swap racks that i have the 3 HDD mounted into and i would like to use the 4th bay, but if i have to backup 1.5 TB of data to expand my raid, i may as well just build a 2nd raid and Xfer the data over.
thanks for the link to openfiler, ill give it a shot and see how it performs!
im just suprised that expandibility is not built into RAID