Raid 5

[SnowyEnigma]

I have 4 400gig Sata seagate 7200.8 drives which at the moment are not raided. I really don't want to loss my data if one of hte drives decides to fail so. I could just connect them to my motherboard's (MSI neo platinum 4 ultra) 4 port onboard raid card or if I should buy a seperate card (which seem to be really expensive...). I'm just worred that if I upgrade I'll loose all my data. will this happen, or can I just unplug them and plug back in on a different raid card.

 

[SnoMunke]

I did when I had 2 drives that were mirrored. Go ahead and install the drives on the new interface card and boot the computer...if you see the drives and your data, then it worked. Make sure you don't do any "auto rebuild" of the RAID array or you will wipe out your data. If you can't see the drives in Windows (or your data), then you will have to get your data off the drives and re-create the RAID array.

 

[Some1ne]

I'm not positive, but I do not think that you can make a RAID-5 out of your drives and simultaneously keep the data that you have on them right now intact. You probably need to do a full backup before creating your RAID (and even if you don't need to, you really, really should just in case something goes wrong).

As far as which you should use, your board's integrated RAID-5 will end up doing software XOR calculations (i.e. it will use the system CPU for them), which can hurt performance in some circumstances. If this bothers you, then the alternative is an add-in card, although getting an add-in card the features a hardware XOR unit is expensive, and if you get one that does not feature this, performance will be the same as using the onboard RAID-5. If I was in your situation, I'd just use the onboard. It's unlikely that you'll ever actually notice the software XOR calculations.

EDIT: And if your main concern is future upgradability, get an add-in card regardless. Even if you transition to a new mainboard, it should still be possible to just move the card into the new board, and keep all the drives attached, and have everything continue to work. The same cannot be said about using the board's integrated RAID-5...if you change boards, or decide later to switch to an add-in card, there is no guarantee that the mainboard's RAID-5 will be correctly detected by the new controller. So...yeah, that's one other reason to consider getting an add-in card over using the built-in RAID-5.