JBOD Question

[daniel1113]

Alright guys,

On my motherboard (Asus A8N-SLI Premium), the only way to use the Sil3114 SATA RAID controller as a standard SATA controller (ie, no RAID, just pass-thru) is to cheat and create a JBOD array for each HDD that contains just that drive. I realize this is extremely short-sighted and just plain dumb, but it really is the only solution for now.

Anyway, here is my question:

Let's say I setup two hard drives as per above, each one with it's own JBOD "array". After a while, if I want to move these drives to a standard SATA controller without any JBOD or RAID setup, will I lose any data or will a drive transfer from a JBOD setup without issue?

I hope this makes sense.

 

[AStar617]

I know what you're getting at, but semantics can be everything in discussions like this. I believe you're referring to creating a single-disk RAID0 "stripe" encompassing each disk (the term "JBOD" in this context is a bit awkward).

My educated guess is that the controller will set aside some type of special private region on the disk to facilitate RAID functionality, regardless of if it's effectively not redundant. This might interfere with a standard controller's ability to properly interpret the contents of the disk, being unaware of any concept of public (data) vs private (config) region. Thus, it's safer to assume you can't just carry it over to any other controller without backing up/restoring your data.

That's how some of them work anyway. I don't have experience with that particular board/controller chip though, so take that with the appropriate-sized grain of salt. If anything, try it! The worst that can happen is the new controller doesn't see the data, so you put it back into the original and keep on truckin'. Good luck.