Raid card question, is there a raid card that you can pull out of a system, and still save your raid setup?

[superHARD]

In the past I played with $50 pata raid cards...When the something happened to the system (mobo died, needed OS rebuilt, etc) I would lose the raid, I would have to rebuild it, and that would erase the info on the drives.

So my question is, what raid card can I have, say, 5 drives plugged into it, decide I want to put this raid setup in another system, unplug the card and take the HD's and the raid card to another system, plug it all in and not have to worry if my data is still there or not.

 

[ForumMaster]

only if it's that same card with the same controller and the same setup. do it like that, and i think it might work. RAID 0 is dangerous.

 

[RaiderJ]

I've pulled my Intel RAID 5 controller from my PIII system, plugged it all into my new 939 server, installed the drivers, and everything worked just fine.

 

[chizow]

The thing you have to be careful about is if the RAID array is your boot drive and you convert it to Dynamic disk. Then if you change platforms, you might have a problem booting into Windows on the new build, similar to any drive going from one board to another.

You might be able to repair/reinstall over top the old install and keep your old files, but overall its pretty messy porting around RAID arrays that are also your boot drive. This time around I just scrapped the RAID array and went with 2x Raptors in JBOD instead.

 

[Fullmetal Chocobo]

I have no problems doing it. I pull my drives out, install the RAID card, install the drivers, shut down the machine, install the hard drives, and then boot up the machine. The RAID information is stored on the drives themselves, so as long as the RAID card and all drivers are installed, the hard drives don't mind at all. Also, this is never my boot drive either--always data storage or gaming arrays.

 

[superHARD]

So, does it matter which raid 5 card you have?

Also I'm not looking for raid 0, I'm thinking Raid 5, or jbod.

 

[chizow]

Originally posted by: superHARD
So, does it matter which raid 5 card you have?

Also I'm not looking for raid 0, I'm thinking Raid 5, or jbod.

Well, if you go with an add-in RAID card you may want to spring for one with a hardware controller (especially if you want to RAID 5). Otherwise you just gain a higher chance for compatibility from system to system without much if any increase in performance over an onboard RAID controller. You'll need at least a 4 port controller for RAID 5 but if you plan to make a larger array may want to look at some 6 or 8 port controllers. 3ware was the best in terms of price to performance last I looked but there may be others nowadays.

 

[superHARD]

Thank you, and with raid 5, all drives have to be the same model number (100% identical?)

 

[Captante]

Originally posted by: superHARD
Thank you, and with raid 5, all drives have to be the same model number (100% identical?)

Ideally you would want identical drives for a RAID array but its not a requirement.. as long as the drives are close in performance & size everything should be fine. It will even work with very different spec drives too, but the slower drives will likely lower the performance of the faster ones & the drive size will be limited to the capacity of the smallest drive in the array in most cases.

One other tip for transferring a RAID array is that if it contains your OS/boot drive your odds of success will be greatly increased if you use the same chipset-based motherboard so that the already installed drivers will work... I've gotten away with swapping from a Via to an Nvidia Athlon XP MB myself but moving from an Nvidia NForce 3 to an NForce 4 Ultra for example is far more likely to go smoothly.