NVRaid Morphing Raid 1 to Raid 5

[meson2000]

Hey Everyone,

Currently I have two 400gig western digital drives running in Raid 1. I want to add another WD 400gig drive and convert my array from Raid 1 to Raid 5. The manual that comes with my motherboard says that the NVRaid Tool can morph my array from Raid 1 to Raid 5. I just want to know if someone has tried to do this? I don't want to reformat the array. I was hoping that I could just convert it without losing any data. Does it work like this? Thanks in advance!

 

[meson2000]

anyone...anyone??? Bueller? Bueller?

 

[meson2000]

Come on. Someone must have attempted it....

 

[meson2000]

echo.......echo........

 

[meson2000]

testing...1....2....3....

 

[karstenanderson]

i did some morphing once with nvidia raid and i believe it worked properly but as always don't trust it and make a backup of anything critical first..

 

[meson2000]

Thanks for your input. What RAID version were you switching to/from? Thanks.

 

[justin368]

I had it working fine as a RAID 1 array. I was curious to see how the computer would perform as a 0 array, so I told it to morph from 0 to 1. Does anyone know how long this should take? I have about half of the 300 gb space (Two 300gb SATA in RAID 1) used, and the NVRAID program has said "Upgrading in progress" for about 12 hours so far. Occasionally I will see a system tool icon pop up with a bubble stating Upgrade in Progress, but other than that I just have the tool running.

Is there any way to cancel this? I've decided I like safety over performance, but theres no cancel button.

BTW meson2000 have you seen this? It's a PDF about the NVRAID tool and morphing and all kinds of other things: http://nvidia.com/attach/531405?type=support&primitive=0

 

[songokussm]

i did a raid 0 to a raid 5 (after adding new drives) and i lost all of my data. Called asus they said that it was a known problem and a bios fix should be released soon. Still hasnt and its been over a year. Backup your data first. needless to say, i bought a new board.

 

[Cr0nJ0b]

I've never done the migration(morph), but generally that is a fairly aggressive solution. If you are in for the fun of it, try it out, but have a backup handy. Most Admins would tell you the best thing to do is to backup your data, kill the set, recreate it the way you want and restore.

On a side note, I have personally come to the conclusion that RAID protection for most of my home data is a waste of space. I use RAID 0 only for the speed benefit. I have lost data a number of times and none of those were recoverable from a mirrored drive. in most cases I got a virus or OS corruption that killed the OS, and forced a rebuild. Now, I'm content with replicating my data to another system with a DirSync product for critical files, and the rest...well...it will be lost.

RAID 5 would cost me a drive worth of capacity, which for space, cooling and power isn't worth my while. My 2 cents.

 

[jiffylube1024]

Why do you want to do RAID 5? Because NVidia/ATI/Intel's current RAID 5 solution is all software, and performance is abysmal - slower than RAID 1 in many cases!

If I were you, I'd just stick in the extra drive and run it as its own drive, alongside the RAID 1 array.