All, I'm conceptually putting together a NFS server in my head. (I will build it once I know what it is!!) What I want is something flexible. ie. Have it start with 3 or 4 drives, then add a drive when I need the capacity. Remove a drive when I don't. replace the drives with bigger drives as the become available. All without losing my data. (Or having to back it up / restore it.) I'd like to start with a 4 disk Raid 10 providing 2 TB of space, but then have the ability to add disks, change raid techniques etc. (ie. convert to raid 6 without data loss!!). mdadm --grow implies it can do this, but there is not much there and my google searches did not turn up much either. Can anyone tell me how well it works and what sorts of things can actually be done. And can it be used to "shrink" a volume. (I believe XFS supports shrinking a filesystem, so I would first shrink the filesystem, then hopefully use mdadm to shrink the raid array.) If mdadm can't do any of this, is there a hardware controller card that can? FYI: The Drobo (www.drobo.com) can do the above as I understand it, but the performance is apparently very slow. Only 5 to 8 MB/sec from the reviews I saw. I want at least 80MB/sec when reading large files. Thanks Greg -- Greg Freemyer Litigation Triage Solutions Specialist http://www.linkedin.com/in/gregfreemyer First 99 Days Litigation White Paper - http://www.norcrossgroup.com/forms/whitepapers/99%20Days%20whitepaper.pdf The Norcross Group The Intersection of Evidence & Technology http://www.norcrossgroup.com -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org