creating concatenated raid drive, will it erase my data?

[ThePiston]

My raid controller card won't recognize my main Windows drive unless I create a concatenated raid on it - will this erase anything on it? it doesn't give me any indication that it will... just sketchy.

 

[Seekermeister]

By "concatenated", do you mean JBOD?

 

[JEDIYoda]

Originally posted by: ThePiston
My raid controller card won't recognize my main Windows drive unless I create a concatenated raid on it - will this erase anything on it? it doesn't give me any indication that it will... just sketchy.

Concatenated array --- http://www.accs.com/p_and_p/RAID/BasicRAID.html
A Concatenated array is NOT RAID, although it is an array. It is a group of disks connected together, end-to-end, for the purpose of creating a larger logical disk. Although it is not RAID, it is included here as it is the result of early attempts to combine multiple disks into a single logical device. There is no redundancy with a Concatenated array. Any performance improvement over a single disk is achieved because the file-system uses multiple disks. This type of array is usually slower than a RAID-0 array of the same number of disks.
The good point of a Concatenated array is that different sized disks can be used in their entirety. The RAID arrays below require that the disks that make up the RAID array be the same size, or that the size of the smallest disk be used for all the disks.

 

[ThePiston]

Yeah I know that it's not really raid, but the BIOS of this SATA raid controller does not have a JBOD setting - it says the only way to get the BIOS to recognize a non-raid drive is to concatenate it but to do that you have to click on "Create Raid Set", then "Concatenate", then "1 drive"... it's the "create raid" part that i was worried about but now I'm thinking this BIOS is just weird and that you have to do this in order to get a single non-raid drive to be seen by the bios.

 

[Seekermeister]

Hmm, I had never heard of that before, it must be a pretty old card. Controller cards are so cheap, why not get a new one? Then you could use a regular raid array. After reading JEDIYoda's link, I still not sure exactly what the difference is between this and JBOD. It's probably very similar, but I would want to understand it exactly, before relying on it.

 

[corkyg]

My answer to the posted question is "No." Concantenate just means "to chain" as in link together. I don't see much difference between that and RAID 0, inless it is in the way the data is written (striping vs normal.)

 

[ThePiston]

I think the problem lies in the fact that I'm trying to get a card that is already labeled as "JBOD" on a Promise controller to post on a Syba controller - the controllers give the drives a designation and the languages do not talk to each other. To get my Promise drive to come up as a single drive on my Syba card, I have to concatenate it as a single drive. This will allow the bios to see it.