Pulling a drive out of a raid 1 mirror

[Double Trouble]

Lets say you have RAID 1 setup, two 1 TB drives hooked up to SATA ports on a P35 chipset motherboard. If you were to pull one of the drives out of the machine and hook it up to some other machine (by USB connection or whatever), would you be able to access the drive and get to the data?

If you're doing RAID 0 or something like that, the answer would be "no" for sure, because you'd be missing some of the information if you only had 1 drive. With RAID 1 though, each drive should be the same. Could you simply connect it to another machine and get to the data?

 

[dwcal]

Short answer, yes.

 

[Double Trouble]

Originally posted by: dwcal
Short answer, yes.

The reason I ask is, what happens if the motherboard fails, could you just take one of the drives to another system to get to the data? I haven't had this situation occur, I'm just curious.

 

[dwcal]

Originally posted by: Double Trouble
The reason I ask is, what happens if the motherboard fails, could you just take one of the drives to another system to get to the data? I haven't had this situation occur, I'm just curious.

Server RAID cards may have a special container format on disk, and you'll have trouble reading the disk on a different RAID card, but desktop RAID 1 has a regular partition table on disk. If you pull the drive, it looks like a regular single disk.