I have a RAID 0+1 (4 drives) each 250 GB, my usable space is 500 GB (250GB+250GB) …

Id like to get 500 GB drives (x4). I understand that if i do insert a 500 GB drive into the array it will act as a 250 GB drive max.

My question is if i replace all drives will it then bump me up to my desired size, in this case (500GB + 500GB) ?

Best bet:
Put in two 500GB drives as a RAID0 element.
Let them synch, they will show up as 250GB drives
remove the two remaining 250GB drives
Use a partition editor to resize the 500s
Add the second pair of 500s

I have been to netapp and am still waiting for approval to gain access but I need info sooner. Yes I am a newbie to these systems and just want to know how to connect the wiring and set it up.

If you are doing this as part of your job, you would have been better to tell him no. I have seen people take on something beyond their current understanding an have it totally fail, or worse create a problem later and cause a serious data loss. It is OK playing like this when it is your own equipment and you have time to experiment, not for a commercial purpose. you are putting your job and future employment record on the line.

I will be reading in lines such as:

/home/data/myfile1:go_back=2:/home/dat…
/home/data/myfile2:go_back=1:/home/dat…
…

basically each line will have about 3 seperate configuration paramaters that I will parse at a later time. For now, I just need the best storage device to hold these lines. Thanks in advance!

If there are only a few lines;
if order is important;
an array, @data
if order is not important
a hash, %data
if there are a lot of lines, you don’t want to store them all in memory. work on each line inside the while($line = <IN>) loop. If readability is the reason you want to read these all in memory, consider using subroutines to keep your while loop neat and readable.

my company is using this as a storage device … and iti s highly unstable … the drives crash down a ot .. what can i do to manage it as i am new and my senior dba is on leave … is there any way i can keep it stable.
i forgot to mention that it is running TRUUNIX 64

Check the Event Viewer located in the Administrative Tools under the control panel. Look for error messages. Right click on the error message and select Properties to locate the problem.

And have it appear as a drive on the "my computer" area of windows ??

i.e if i had a windows 2008 server, could i mount a dell powervault md 3000 ( http://www1.euro.dell.com/content/products/productdetails.aspx/pvaul_md3000?c=uk&cs=ukbsdt1&l=en&s=bsd ) and have it appear under "my computer" as a new drive or would i need linux to achieve the same effect.

I’m not sure how the Dell Powervault works specifically, but if it runs standard SMB, it should be simple enough to map as a network drive, and have it appear in my computer as F: or G: or whatever drive you assign it. Or, if it connects directly to the server via USB/iSCSI you might be able to add it to the Windows file system as a mount point (as long as you are running NTFS, and its not clustered).

Go to Computer Management > Disk Management > Initialize Disk if the disk is not already initialized > Highlight the disk and select ‘Change drive letters & paths’ > Add > ‘Mount in the following empty NTFS folder’. The new drive will now appear as a folder in your file system. Volume mount points are transparent to programs!