Take a mirrored raid drive and use it in another machine

hardwareraid

I have about a dozen low end servers of varying makes and models and most have mirrored raid. I'm a bit confused about whether after a disaster (that hasn't harmed the drives) can I can take a drive from a mirrored set and stick it in another machine and use it as normal or do I need another compatible RAID card to get at the data.

Edit:
To be clear, this isn't about getting the drive into another server as a working entity, it's just a theoretical question as to whether a drive that was part of a drive mirror can be read by any other machine or if the fact that it has been in RAID means it is somehow formatted differently or has it's data written in such a way that it can't be read or used without being part of a RAID system or plugged into a compatible RAID card.

Best Answer

You still need a good back-up!

Ideally you have separate RAID volumes for the operating system and for your application data, and you'll only need to move the data disks. Because even if you move the disks with the operating system volume to an identical server, things like MAC addresses on the NIC's will be different and than may give some (minor) problems when you try to reboot after moving disks.

Typically if you use software RAID, you have a little bit more leeway in how different your servers can be and still and up with a working and intact RAID set.

When you use hardware RAID, I expect you'll need exactly the same RAID controller, although possibly you might have some leeway and a controller from the same series works too.

I think most hardware RAID controllers use the first few sectors of the drive to store their array meta data and the disk will appear uninitialised to other RAID controllers, or the OS if you plug the disk in a system without a raid controller.

Depending on the brand of RAID controller, you may still need to import the moved disks from the RAID controllers BIOS menu, as the moved disks can be considered a foreign configuration, created by a different controller.

Related Topic