I have a small 🙂 NAS box with 6 x 1TB HDD in RAID 6 and 4 x 500GB HDD in RAID 5. Recently thanks to the arrival of my baby girl and a HD handy cam, I was running out of space fast on the array and so when when I saw a decent deal for 1TB drives in NewEgg I picked up couple to add to the RAID 6 volume.
Growing a raid array in linux using mdadm is easy. I made sure I used fdisk to create single large partition on the drive and mark the partition type fd (Linux raid autodetect) prior to adding it to the array.
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdm1 1 121601 976760001 fd Linux raid autodetect
Adding the drives to the raid is straightforward
mdadm --add /dev/md1 /dev/sdl1
mdadm --add /dev/md1 /dev/sdm1