I have a Linux server with four 2 TB drives in a RAID arrangement. This array is then added to a Volume Group and a Logical Volume is created from it. This Logical Volume is shared out to a Windows box via Samba.
I am going to get four 3 TB drives and would like to add them into the mix so that the Windows only sees a single share/drive to mount.
Example four 2 TB drives RAID 5 (as an example) gives me a single 6 TB drive volume mounted in Windows via SAMBA. Let’s call the share/LV 2tbshare. Data is then put on the 2tbshare and fills up the entire share.
Four new 3 TB drives are purchased. I was thinking of just adding them in via RAID. 2 TB + 2 TB + 2 TB + 2 TB + 3 TB + 3 TB + 3 TB + 3 TB (RAID5 as an example) but this would waste 1 TB on each of the 3 TB drives resulting in a 14 TB array.
I could create two RAID arrays. 1 RAID array of 2 TB drives and 1 RAID array of 3 TB drives. But how do I combine these? Do I add both RAID arrays into a single Volume Group and then create the Logical Volume 2tbshare from the Volume Group? What happens if one of the drives fails?
Or do I just keep the 2 TB and 3 TB drives as JBOD and add all of them into a single Volume Group. Then create the logical volume off of this Volume Group? What would be the total size of this Volume Group?
What would be the best approach?