[xubuntu-users] Can increase space by adding hard disk?

[Tim H.]

> I am a newbie to Xubuntu. Mind telling me step by step guide how to do it?

Raid level 0 allows you to increase the disk space of a partition beyond 
that of your drive.  In essence you are combining drives and/or 
partitions.  Keep in mind the existing partion will be formatted 
(erased).  So if you are trying to use your main disk this isn't going 
to work.  But you can shrink your disk and use whats left.

Say you have the new disk /dev/sdb; it needs partitioned.  Use gparted, 
it's easy.  `fdisk /dev/sdb` is another option.  We'll call it /dev/sdb1

Then you can shrink your main drive,/dev/sda1 maybe, to a smaller size 
and format whats left.  We'll call it /dev/sda2

Now combine the disks using mdadm:

	mdadm -Cv /dev/md0 -l0 -n2 /dev/sda2 /dev/sdb1
	mkfs.ext4 /dev/md0

To make this combined partition start by default you can add it to 
fstab.  But first you need to add lines like this to the 
/etc/mdadm/mdadm.conf file:

DEVICE /dev/sda2 /dev/sdb1
ARRAY /dev/md0 level=raid0 devices=/dev/sda2,/dev/sdb1

Now you can do whatever you want with this combine partition.  For 
instance I keep all my media on a raid level 0 combined partition of 3 
different drives.

Tim