Hardware Raid Setup Question - LVM?
 

Hello,

I had a few questions i was hoping some of you guys can shed some light.

I had just setup a small Raid 5 on my home fileserver for testing, and it seems to be working great! However I can across a few questions that i couldnt find the awnsers to while digging around.

My setup for example is a 3 400Gb Western Digital drives attached to the 9500s 3ware card. Setup went great! Shut down my debian box, plugged the pci card in, hooked up the 3 drives, Powered her up, then configed the Raid as Raid 5. Rebooted and I had about 780GB of Raided space to play with.

Now I formated the drive as ext3 and mounted it as "raiddrive" (1 large partition) and was able to move some files to it and worked perfect.

My Question now, after i did this is what happens if I have to add a drive? I googled it, and it seems i may have setup this wrong, from what I am reading I should have used Linux LVM - Logical Volume Manager?

With my current setup what would happen if I added a 4th drive to the Raid Array? (which would bring my space upto about 1.2 TB)

Its a bid confusing as this is my first time firing up a hardware raid config, and am doing it for some experiance and of course personal use.

Thanks in advance for your advice!
- John