software raid 5 non-destructive array expansion

[Como]

title basically says it- but is it possible/probable?

I have four identical hard drives. One is full, one has some data on it, two are empty. I'm looking to create a raid5 array (for redundancy purposes, not speed) out of an old box. Boot off of a dedicated hard drive, controller card for the 4 hdd's.

now i can temporarily move stuff off that second drive with just some stuff on it, but theres no way i could offload a full drive- that would leave me with three empty drives, enough to start a raid5 array and dump the data off the fourth disk.

But then i'd want to ADD the fourth disk to the array, without losing the data.

I've seen raid cards do this, is there a software equiv?

btw, linux server w/ samba shares. 10% write access 90% read, no big speed hurries (wireless B can usually keep up with the kind of access i do)

thanks in advance!

[3line]

Well, I haven't encountered this feature with regards to my experiences with RAID 5. I highly doubt it exists.

[Como]

One reccomendation i got from someone on IRC (god bless irc) is to build the array as a 4 disk array, but mark one drive as 'failed'.
then write the data to it, and 'replace' the drive, at which point the system would go about re-building the array, as if it had just had a failed disk replaced.

Awesome, and probably works!