In an earlier article article I outlined how to manually create a NAS device with standard Linux tools. This article shows you how to resize the array that you created. In the example that I used, we have replaced our 1 terabyte drives with 2 terabyte drives. Then we extend our logical volume and the file system that sits on top.

Warning, if the data is important or mission critical, BACK IT UP! One wrong step and you could very likely hose all of your data!

The first thing we need to do is replace the drives, one at time. This may take a while (about 4 hours per disk on my machine) as the array has to be rebuilt each and every time you replace a drive. During this period you are vulnerable to data loss as you no longer have a valid parity drive. If another disk fails in this time period then will likely lose your data. In case you missed it before, BACK UP YOUR IMPORTANT DATA FIRST!

On my machine the drives were installed into hot swappable drive trays, and the SATA chipset supported hot swapping. Your system may differ, in which case you may need to shutdown and reboot to swap every drive.

On my machine I just removed the first drive. I checked dmesg and noticed that the drive I removed was /dev/sdd.