Swapping one RAID for another

[BaneSilvermoon]

I have a failed drive in my RAID0 setup, though I expect to be able to recover the drive at some point. (it's one of the seagate barracudas that is no longer visible by the BIOS) Personally, even if it get's repaired and works perfectly I don't think I'll be confortable running on these drives anymore. Either way I'm probably going to pickup a new set of WD drives to RAID.

As of right now I have one half of my old RAID0 sitting in the case still. When (if) the other gets repaired intact I should be able to pop it back in and fire her up with no problem. What I'm wondering is if I were to pull the current hard drives out, put in two new WD drives, RAID them and run on that. When I get the damaged drive back would I be able to just swap them back out again and access my old info on the original RAID set with no problems? Nothing stored in the RAID controller that would screw with it after having built a new RAID on two other drives?

Oh and if anybody wants to try and talk me into getting a single drive instead of another RAID feel free

 

[LittleNemoNES]

Welcome to AT

how are you going to repair a failed RAID 0 array? Unless you can get the other HDD back online you're SOL.

When you send it for repair, in 99.99% sure they wipe out your data...

Unless you meant RAID 1 which is ok.

 

[BaneSilvermoon]

According to Seagate it's a firmware error that causes a failsafe on the drive to go off making it invisible to the BIOS. No data corruption whatsoever. They offer to manually do the firmware upgrade and send the drives back data intact, no change whatsoever.

I actually picked up an external casing to build a new external drive last week. SO I just went ahead and ordered a WD 640GB drive I was planning on getting for that today. Figure I'll just run on it as an internal drive until I get this thing back from Seagate.

Still haven't decided whether or not I'm gonna bother with a RAID again after I recover my stuff from this, but I'm starting to think I might just run that 640GB drive permanently.

 

[rarebear]

If they send you back the same drive you should be able to get the data back I think..

But I would not change the biso setting..

They may get your drive repaired in a week if you can wait..


I am not so sure WD is much better than Seagate..
I just RMAed a 20 day old 1TB Black to WD and two months before a SE16

I would wait and install the drive and then run the firmware update on the good drive if you can and have a good backup plan..

 

[Nothinman]

If you used the onboard fakeRAID then you're at it's mercy, I wouldn't risk touching it's settings until my data was backed up.

 

[BaneSilvermoon]

Thanx for the input. It was the Marvel onboard RAID on my M3A32-MVP Deluxe. I'm hoping they get back to me quickly, but from looking around their forums it sounds like they have a two to three week backlog on these things before they even get started. I doubt I can go a month with no computer. Making it a week will be feat for me. I may have to just take my chances on losing what I had.

I was thinking about the future setup today though and I'm starting to think I might just toss the WD into the external like I had originally planned and then set these two seagate drives back up in a RAID1. That way I won't be paranoid about the Seagate drives after having problems with them.

What are the odds of both of them dumping on me at the sametime heh.