Raid-1 is mirroring two disks (if I haven't messed up completely here :p). Does that mean that I could take one disk out and put it into another machine and it would work like a normal disk? Or does it still only work in the raid? I can understand that a Raid-0 of course only works as a whole. But with mirroring I am not so sure how it works…
Of course putting the mirrored disk back in the raid afterwards would be a bad idea, but just taking it out… how would that work? Does raid store any special data on a drive that is needed? or does the raid controller handle everything like that and the harddrives are just used like normal?
Best Answer
Well, the REAL answer is that it depends on the RAID controller. There's Hardware RAID and there's 'Fake RAID' -- which is basically a ROM implementation of software RAID.
Fake Raid will always require the same controller, just as using a linux software raid will require the same operating system (and sometimes the same kernel module version).
Real hardware RAID will SOMETIMES mean that you can swap them between machines, but in some cases you will need to have the same or a similar RAID card. One case where I've seen this is with a RAID5 volume on a Dell PERC/3di card. I haven't ever tried it with RAID1, but I understand it's possible.
Usually, yes, it does.
Sometimes this is true -- either independently from the data on the drive, or in concert with data on the drive. i.e. the drive may have metadata readable only to a certain class of controller that says it was part of a RAID1 pair, and other controllers will ignore that metadata.