Last year, I built a NAS machine as referenced by my previous post here. This month, my media drive composed of an LVM logical volume of almost 5TB is almost filled.
This drive contains all purchased media and our home videos for Plex, as well as our time machine backups. To alleviate the storage shortage, I purchased two 4TB Western Digital WD40EFRX hard drives. This weekend I took the plunge and installed the two new drives into my NAS computer. In the spirit of the moment, without performing a backup, I proceeded to:
- Use parted to partition the drives;
- Use mdadm to create a RAID 1 device of the two drives;
- Created a new LVM physical volume with the new RAID device;
- Added the volume to the existing volume group;
- Extend the logical volume to newly added 4TB;
- and finally, Extend the ext4 file system to include the 4TB
In the end, I now have a near 9TB network drive that should last me for quite sometime.
In researching how to extend the logical volume, I also found out how I can upgrade my drives in my existing physical volumes to higher capacity drives without having to recopy everything to another drive first. This should come in handy in the future, because my NAS computer box has no more drive bays.
I know I probably should have taken a backup before this, but everything worked and I couldn’t be happier. Hurray, hurray, and hurray for software RAID.