Does creating a RAID set in LMCE on existing drive with media, wipe it out?

[seth]

 
I have just picked up a couple of 500G internal SATA drives. I currently have 1 internal 500G drive, with media on it, using the pluto structure.

My question is this, if I add 2 more 500G drives to it and create a raid 5 disk using LMCE's RAID facility, will it wipe out the data on the original disk?

I have never created a RAID set on a disk that contained data, so I figured I would ask to see if anyone here has done this or knows what the outcome would be.

The current disk has just over 400G of media on it.

Thanks.

Regards,

Seth

[Zaerc]

I think the trick is to build a (degraded) raid-5 out of the two empty drives, copy the stuff over and then add the third.  But I haven't been brave enough to test that myself, so all I can say for sure is the obvious: if you value your data back it up first (at least the irreplaceable stuff).  And bluntly creating the array with data already on the drives is sure to destroy it. 

[seth]

 
Sounds like a good idea, back up first, then attempt.

Thanks for the input.

Regards,

Seth

[PeteK]

Can you create a RAID 1 array first and then migrate that?  That may be a bit easier to understand what's going on before trying to move your data into a RAID 5 array.

[hari]

read zearcs post again.

br, Hari