Can you convert from firmware RAID 5 to hardware?

Snooper

Senior member
Oct 10, 1999
465
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Folks,

Quick question: If I start out with a four disk RAID 5 attached to my P5B (all the disks it can have in a RAID 5), will I be able to migrate the disks to a hardware RAID 5 running on a HighPoint RocketRAID 2320 WITHOUT dataloss?

Could it be as simple as installing the card and plugging in the drives? Other methods that don't require me to backup and restore a full Terabyte of data?

Thanks for the help!
 

Steve

Lifer
May 2, 2004
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www.chicagopipeband.com
What sort of RAID chip does each run? Thing is, different RAID controllers address drives differently, geometry-wise. You might want to ask this over at forums.storagereview.net.
 

Fike

Senior member
Oct 2, 2001
388
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I have a Rocket Raid 133 and I would guess that it wouldn't work based upon my experience. You will probably want to back everything up anyway, so if you do that, you have done half the work towards rebuilding the RAID array.
 

Matthias99

Diamond Member
Oct 7, 2003
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Unlikely unless the discrete controller uses the same chipset as the onboard one. Or they both conform to some standardized format so they can read each other's volumes (also unlikely.)
 

bwnv

Senior member
Feb 3, 2004
419
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Probably not gonna happen. The raid on the p5b are southbridge SATA ports, the Highpoint has one of thier (proprietary) controllers. Back up that data and then move the raid. Looks like one sweet card though.
 

RebateMonger

Elite Member
Dec 24, 2005
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It's extremely unlikely that this will work. Even if it does, you'll STILL want to back up the 1TB of data before trying to move the array, unless don't really care if you lose the data. There's too many things that could go wrong when moving the array. RAID5 arrays are NOT easily recoverable without backups.

I calculated the restore time for somebody else a while back. My recollection is that transferring 1TB from a backup hard drive across a SATA-to-SATA interface shouldn't take more than a few hours. Same thing with a 1GB network connection. Don't know about a tape backup....
 

Snooper

Senior member
Oct 10, 1999
465
1
76
Thanks for the replies folks. I guess I'll just have to bite the bullet and do a proper backup if/when I go for the upgrade. Most everything on there can be recovered (the hard way) anyway, so it would suck to have all my audio and DVDs go away, I could always blow the dust of the cases and rerip everything.... It won't be the first time!

Thank fully, I have a gigabit link between my desktop and my server, so I should be able to get everything (compressed) on there if I stuff one of my extra drives in the server.