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Migrating a RAID Array

11/6/2007 3:58:07 AM

Jack Shaftoe

271 posts

Migrating a RAID Array
(United States)

Anyone know if it is possible to take a RAID 5 array and move it to another machine without buying all new HDD's? I have a 4x 500GB array in one of my main machines at home, and I want to rebuild the box with something faster in the next 6 months but I don't know if it is possible to move the array to another RAID controller like that. Would really appreciate any feedback/advice on this.

Thanks,

"I think we're on the verge of a major climate shift. The government has to start making long term preparations now."
"Jack, all you have is a theory."
"Well then give me the mainframe and let me prove it!!!"

11/6/2007 6:51:08 AM

Xaak

1054 posts

Re: Migrating a RAID Array
(United States)

I've successfully moved several raid arrays to newer motherboards. However, in both cases they were the intel southbridge controlled raid 5 arrays.

They were moved from the ich8 (intel 965 chipset based board) to ich9 (35 chipset based board). In one case the raid array was bootable and worked fine, in the other case it was a data only array.

You probably can't do this with dissimilar controllers, but it looks like the intels are backwards compatible.

Make a backup anyway, just in case. You never know what will happen when moving things around.

Also, if it is the intel southbridge based Raid, make sure you update to the latest matrix storage manager on the old box, and install the same version on the new box before booting with the array in place.

Gary
You can't fix dead.

11/6/2007 3:15:40 PM

Jack Shaftoe

271 posts

Re: Migrating a RAID Array
(United States)

Lots of good info Xaak, thanks for sharing that! What I'm using is an Asus A8R-MVP board (939) with a ULi M1575 southbridge that serves as my controller. The array is storage-only, I boot to another drive.

Is it safe to assume that I will probably have more success doing this by maintaining a ULi > ULi upgrade path?

Backing this array up will be a problem for me. I don't have 1.5TB to dump it, which is why I asked if this was possible in the first place.

11/6/2007 3:31:40 PM

Jack Shaftoe

271 posts

Re: Migrating a RAID Array
(United States)

Is it safe to assume that I will probably have more success doing this by maintaining a ULi > ULi upgrade path?

Hmm... looks like ULi doesn't exist anymore now that nVidia scooped them up. I'm concerned that this might be difficult to answer with more certainty than "possible but not probable".

I also spotted this in my google results:

http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/07/10/the_raid_migration_adventure/

Which I will be reading shortly.

2/8/2008 10:08:38 AM

jmartin0106

1 posts

Re: Migrating a RAID Array
(N/A)

Alot of it will have to do with where the raid config is stored. For instance, on a Dell Poweredge server, the raid config is mostly stored in a battery backed VRAM stick. Now, if your raid controller goes down, it is nearly impossible to recover the array using conventional methods. The config is lost. On the other hand, HP ML series servers store the raid config on the disks, so you can pull the disks from one server, pop them into another HP server, fire it up, and it works like magic.

I am really not up to speed on consumer class raid. I deal mostly with servers. So I cant really offer you much help. But if you can find out where the config is stored, you may be able to more easily migrate.

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