Moving to new raid controller.

[w0ss]

Anyone ever done this? I have a SCSI raid controller with some scsi drives. The controller is an old 32bit/33Mhz card and I have been maxing out on the controller bandwidth. I found a bunch of PCI-X controllers but I assume I will not be able to just plug the drives in. The current controller is an HP Netraid-1M.
Thanks,
Will

 

[w0ss]

bump any ideas?

 

[w0ss]

night time bump

 

[Madwand1]

PCI-X is usually (if not always) backwards-compatible with PCI. However, unless you have a PCI-X (server) motherboard, they're not going to do you any good -- they'll run at PCI speed. Moreover, PCI-X implementation speeds vary; just because a (rare, server) motherboard has PCI-X support doesn't mean that it has PCI-X 133/64 support. Finally, PCI-X is fading, and if you want to do this with a forward viewpoint, and especially from a consumer hardware viewpoint, you might want to consider PCIe controllers.

On the server side, standards tend to last longer, and that's probably why PCI-X is popular in part -- because of its PCI backwards-compatibility. They'll be around for some time, but the newer hotness is going to be PCIe...

 

[w0ss]

The motherboard has PCI-X 64bit/133Mhz so I am good in that regards. My concern is that I have the OS and everything else installed on the drives so I would need some way to carry the data on the drives to a new controller.

 

[Jiggz]

You can do this except you will need to start all over again with your hdd's. You will need to clone the existing Raid array to another hdd and then install the new controller, connect the hdd's and then configure the array. Partition and format and then re-clone the back up hdd to the new raid array.

 

[w0ss]

doh I figured that was the case. Any recomendations for disk imaging. Would something like ghost work with a scsi array?
Thanks,
Will

 

[stevty2889]

Acronis True Image worked for cloning my SATA raid array, so it outta work with SCSI as well. Not 100% sure on that though, but worth looking in to.