I have a file server that i am using for several pertinent reasons. I am running a RAID 1 setup (mirrored drives) for redundancy with two 200gb drives. I want to upgrade the drives or basically add 500gb of storage. My question is, can i simply add another raid card with two the two new drives attached and install as usual? I will only be using the two 500gb drives attached to the new RAID card for data storage and won't be trying to do any OS booting from those, strictly storage. Thanks!

Yea it will work - If you have troublebooting, just ensure your bios is booting to the RAID card that has your OS on it. If you are using them for storage, you may want to put them in a RAID 0 (the 500's), it will combine the drives space, and give you faster access times. If it were me, and these were SATA drives, I would upgrade the RAID card to a 4 port. Thanks for any input.

Josh, Thanks for the reply. Unfortunately they are not sata. It's an older computer i converted to a server a while ago. That is def on the wish list for when this one goes down. I'm really looking for the redundancy since i am using this to backup 15 computers on my lan. I had aonther question since you seem to know what's going on. Since the raid card i am using is only 2 port, couldn't i still plug each of the 500's into the additional connector on the ribbon cable that up until now has only had a single drive on each? Thanks man!

Most ceratinly! The most efficent way would be to do it this way. Keep Boot drives on IDE0 (Master/Slave) Keep Data drive on IDE1 (Master/Slave) I would backup your data first, since I am assuming you have one drive plugged into each port. When you put them both on the same port, you will have to rebuild the RAID array and that will erase your data. BUT - If you have each *boot* drives on seperate ports (IDEO,IDE1), you can just hookup 1 backup drive to a boot drive, and that would keep you from having to rebuild the array. Thanks for any input.

Josh, The latter is what i would like to do. I have the original drives (200gb) hooked up with one drive on each port. I would love to just hook 1 500 to each cable to preserver the original array data and effectively have 700gb on each channel of the array. So you think this will work without alot of yada yada? Thanks again!

You would/wouldn't technically have 700gb you would have a 400gb partition and 1000gb partition which again just equals 700 per channel- When you add the two new drives to the existing boot drives, you are going to have to make another array including specifically those *500gb* two drives - then you will setup a partition one the new array within Disk Management You MAY run into some issues with running slave drives in an array that are on 2 seperate channels with an array already setup between the two channels/boot drives already, that you will have to see when you setup your second array with those new drives. Worst comes to worst, if it does not let you create another array, you can at least unhook the new drives and boot like normal for data backup. Again, the most efficent way to run this setup would be CH0 - BOOT/BOOT ARRAY0 CH1 - DATA/DATA ARRAY1 and would be suggested. Mainly for this reason, running 2 arrays on each cable is overkill on the drives and cable, since data for all drives will have to stream all over both IDE cables. At least with boot / data on seperate cables, it keeps them running on the same cable which will increase performance, and reduce likelyness of error and wear and tear on the RAID. Thanks for any input.

Josh, Thanks alot. I think i just may break the array and move the original drives over to the 0 channel. I was just trying to get out of dealing with the rebuilding if i didn't have to since i have 200gb+ of data already on these drives. I'll try this within the next couple of days and post back so that if anyone else is looking for his info they will be able to see what happens. Thanks again.