Breaking RAID and restoring single disk volumes

[destrekor]

I have an Intel "fake-raid" storage solution, which spans two physical drives (Drive 1 and Drive 2).
It contains two distinct volumes ("Speed" and "Storage").

Can I create images of those two volumes, place them on an external hard drive for temporary storage, then proceed to partition Drive 1 and restore those volumes, all without breaking installations and known storage points for applications like Lightroom?

Due to the RAID storage loss, the 2x 2TB drives end up making ~1TB "Speed" and ~1.4GB "Storage", so I plan on making those two, with some volume size loss, fit onto one physical 2TB drive. I'll be removing a large chunk, which consists of RAW files, and there's a lot of saved downloads that are worthless that I need to get rid of anyhow.

The plan is to have a now fresh 2TB drive (Drive 2) available to be made fully read/write accessible to OS X. I do believe I can make that a GUID and HFS+ drive, and through third-party, get Windows to have read/write capability. (alternatively, I may investigate getting full read/write NTFS access in Mac... not sure about the "data safety" for that one... I want to avoid the risk of corruption, obviously).

I plan to make OS X the main photo-editing environment, so all my RAW files and Lightroom's (or any other RAW converter if I make the move) database of non-destructive edits, would go on the disk mostly dedicated to Apple. I'd want to have access to that data from Windows though. I am NOT sure about being able to access the same RAW file edits between Lightroom in Windows and from within OS X (as in, not sure if I can "share" one storage between two instances across two OS's - to be investigated).


In the end, I'd still then have a 4TB powered external drive to use for scheduled backups and thus still maintain the main purpose of why I even went the fake-raid route. Really in the end, I'll have even more actually backed up, since I wouldn't have the ability to rebuild the one volume (Speed) if a disk died.

 

[destrekor]

And for the record, a true RAID5 NAS is really the kind of thing in mind for a real long-term storage and backup system. Until I can afford to invest in the right NAS box/controller, and the hard drives, I'll be settling for a little more simpler system.

 

[mfenn]

Yes, you can do what you want. First, delete enough files so that your total usage across both volumes is less that 2 TB (1.81 TiB). That's so that they'll physically fit on a single drive. Then go into Computer Management and shrink the volumes so that the sum of the volume sizes is less than 1.81 TiB.

After that, it's just a matter of imaging the volumes with your favorite imaging program (Acronis works well), breaking the RAID, and restoring the images. Make sure that you give the two volumes the same drive letters that they had before, and no programs will know the difference.

 

[destrekor]

Yes, you can do what you want. First, delete enough files so that your total usage across both volumes is less that 2 TB (1.81 TiB). That's so that they'll physically fit on a single drive. Then go into Computer Management and shrink the volumes so that the sum of the volume sizes is less than 1.81 TiB.

After that, it's just a matter of imaging the volumes with your favorite imaging program (Acronis works well), breaking the RAID, and restoring the images. Make sure that you give the two volumes the same drive letters that they had before, and no programs will know the difference.

Sweet, thanks!
I thought it worked like that (ensuring drive letters and volume names matched). I figured so long as the drive paths lined up, that's all the registry entries for various programs looked at.

I felt a need to make sure there would be no hard-coded references to controllers and/or physical (virtual) disk IDs or model/serial numbers.

Yeah, right now total used storage on the volumes does not exceed storage of a formatted single 2TB drive - volume capacities do, but I'm not worried about that.


Now to just figure out the best approach for the other goals.
I know FAT32 can shared perfectly fine between OS X and Windows - the file size and partition limitations, on the other hand, kill that idea.

Thoughts on HFS+ read/write under Windows? If Mac IS to become my lead platform for photography, I'd want the performance of HFS+ in that platform. If there is performance loss using Paragon's HFS+ driver in Windows, ehh... might not be a terrible deal.
Still trying to investigate the nature of a shared drive from Adobe's perspective...

 

[mfenn]

I'd shrink the volumes within Windows before I made any images. Good imaging software can work around that, but its easy to be sure.

I don't really have any experience with HFS+ under Windows I'm afraid. Usually what you'd do is to have all the shared stuff on a NAS and access it from Windows and Mac that way.

 

[destrekor]

I don't really have any experience with HFS+ under Windows I'm afraid. Usually what you'd do is to have all the shared stuff on a NAS and access it from Windows and Mac that way.

Would not the filesystem still matter for NAS purposes? I haven't worked with proper NAS systems, but I think only FAT32 and ExFAT can be accessed by all Operating Systems.
And I'm trying to avoid those two. It's either a shared universal but non-modern filesystem, or proprietary filesystems and one of the OS's has a third-party driver to allow read/write access.

 

[mfenn]

No, the underlying filesystem does not matter (for compatibility purposes) when you're accessing files sitting on a NAS. It's abstracted away by the file sharing protocol (CIFS, NFS, AFP, etc.). All you need is for the NAS and client to agree on the protocol. CIFS (also called Samba and SMB) is default for Windows PCs and OS X can handle it perfectly fine as well.

 

[destrekor]

No, the underlying filesystem does not matter (for compatibility purposes) when you're accessing files sitting on a NAS. It's abstracted away by the file sharing protocol (CIFS, NFS, AFP, etc.). All you need is for the NAS and client to agree on the protocol. CIFS (also called Samba and SMB) is default for Windows PCs and OS X can handle it perfectly fine as well.

:hmm:

Good to know!