On Thu, Oct 29, 2009 at 9:59 PM, Ryan Coleman <ryan.coleman at cwis.biz> wrote: > Yeah, ... uhm... that's a hardware expense that is not an option. I > make <$5000/year with this work personally and $3000 for the unit is > about 3x what I'd pay for the hardware... > > I already have the hardware I need, just need to know the best route > to go to expand. I think your best option is to swap out the drives one by one. That controller claims to support hot swap, so it should be trivial to replace each disk, one by one. You shouldn't encounter downtime, as the RAID 5 parity will continue to host the data while you swap out the drive. Obviously do a little reading before attempting :-) The other option is to go to a NAS or SAN type solution. Sounds like you have enough hardware that you could homebrew yourself a NAS/SAN appliance with openfiler. Then you could run both RAID configurations and have uber-loads of disk space. Brian