Transfering raid arrays

[flowrider]

Ok so here's what I got. If you look at my sig you'll see I have a Giga Pro2 board and two different raid array's. I'm pretty happy with the setup but I was thinking of getting a new Abit mobo and want to run a Promise Raid card.

My question is will I have to recreate the array thereby losing everything or will the Promise card recognize and use the existing array?

 

[Startech]

If the raid supporting chip is the same, at equivalent level, you may be able to transplant the drives. I was able to do this moving accross compatible HighPoint chips.

 

[flowrider]

Ahhh I see. I was looking at the NFS-7. I think that the onboard raid chip is the same but I wanted to transfer the 2 80gig drives as well.

 

[Startech]

Ahhh I see. I was looking at the NFS-7. I think that the onboard raid chip is the same but I wanted to transfer the 2 80gig drives as well.

I don't think it matters if you have one array or two. It would be the same process.

Note that I said "you may me able", not you will be able.

 

[Startech]

This is what I would do assuming the raid hardware is compatible:

1. I would get the Promise card and install it in the current system., with drivers...

2. Make a backup of your Maxtor-80GB. You may be able to zip the particions or subdirectories in raptor array, or to DVDs.

3. Stop system and move Maxtor-80 to new adapter, and see if the controller BIOS recognizes the array. I am not familiar with the Promise family, but I assume there is a BIOS menu for configuration. You will have to figure out the process. But basically, I would think, it either comes up recognized or not.

4a. If it does, great. Now you have some experience to move the Raptors.

4b. If not, you have to use the backups, but you may want to go ahead and use the Maxtor-80s to backup the other array to make the jump.
If you are not ready for the mobo jump, you can choose to move the drives back until you are ready, or restore them and leave them in the new adapter.

I am not sure if you need to give some consideration or not as to where (channel..) you place the Maxtor-80 drives bacause later on you want to have the Raptor as the boot array.

If all is smooth (and you are lucky) you may be able to make the jump without re-installing the system

 

[flowrider]

Thanks Startech. I suppose the best course of action of course would be to reinstall the whole thing to keep thing streamlined. This is the first time that I've used Raid 0 and although fast I'm finding it a little difficult for transport between systems (for storage drives anyhow). I've already had a new 80gig Maxtor drive fry on one array and I lost 90 gigs of data. I had it backed up but through a comedy of errors, lost it all anyhow.

 

[Startech]

Thanks Startech. I suppose the best course of action of course would be to reinstall the whole thing to keep thing streamlined. This is the first time that I've used Raid 0 and although fast I'm finding it a little difficult for transport between systems (for storage drives anyhow). I've already had a new 80gig Maxtor drive fry on one array and I lost 90 gigs of data. I had it backed up but through a comedy of errors, lost it all anyhow.

If I have to tell the truth, I gave up on IDE raid. I went thru three different setups. I still have raid on my scsi rig, with a real hardware raid controller that has a "small" cache of 128MB

Good luck with your transfer.