RAID almost full, what are my options

Hi we have a xserve RAID 5.6TB with 14 x 400Gb drives, set up as RAID 50.
We are now getting to the stage where the RAID is getting quite full and need to start planning how we deal with this with the minimum disruption and cost, what are our options?

The short answer is "you can't" and the longer answer is "maybe you can but you shouldn't".
If you did find another Xserve RAID with 400GB drives in it you maybe could create a giant RAID 0 from the underlying RAIDs but the potential for data loss with some many moving parts underneath would make it IMHO unacceptable. And even if you did get that to work you would need to restripe the new RAID and wouldn't be able to just "expand" the current one.
As usual William is right. Your best option is to buy a larger capacity box like a Promise RAID and migrate your current data to it. The next best option would be to see if you can find 16 Xserve RAID compatible 750GB PATA drives and replace your 400s. But this would require backing everything off and then restoring the data AND those drives are getting very hard to find.
Sorry the news isn't better but mixing too many or mismatched (in terms of speed and/or size) parts into a single volume is bad idea AND without a fancy filesystem designed to expand endlessly it's hard to keep the same volume going perpetually. As a performance issue you really do want to limit how many simultaneous writes you're doing on a single journaled HFS volume. Since every change needs to get written to the journal if there are too many changes the journal can become a performance choke point. While this is more a function of use and number of users a single 9TB+ volume would hold the potential for this kind of conflict.
My $.02,
=Tod

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