RAID 1 vs mobo upgrade - lose everything anyways?

Deusfaux

Correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldnt' having a RAID1 (mirror) array with 2 drives sort of get fucked with the upgrade of a motherboard?

Since the particular RAID controller would likely change, and thus the RAID couldnt be migrated over.

And since a new array would have to be created under the new controller, all the data would be lost?



Would it not be better in that case to do "manual" mirroring and just remember to backup all your data to the 2nd drive on some kind of schedule, using someting like Synctoy?

That way your OS drive can be reformatted or whatever on mobo changes, and you still have all your stuff backed up on the 2nd drive?


Yes RAID1 would make things "easier" in that you dont have to remember to do everything but it seems to me to have a fatal flaw.

You'd have to back everything up to a 3rd drive or a pile of dvd's before migrating to the new mobo...

devoir

I'm pretty sure that most proper RAID controllers will actually leave each disk able to operate independently if the controller fails/is replaced.

Deusfaux

yes they do, that's the purpose of RAID1.

but since he'd have to migrate to a new raid controller on a new motherboard...

that involves recreating the raid array - ie the new controller couldnt "see" the old raid array.

and creating a new raid array erases everything on the disks. both disks. so the data would be lost unless it's backed up to a 3rd HDD or optical discs or something

Daedalus

I am fairly certain that this is only a problem for RAID setups more complicated than RAID 1.

If he had a RAID 5 set up or something, maybe, but RAID 1 is just writing everything to both drives at the same time.

If I were him I'd just back up important stuff to CDs and then wing it.

stigweard

Onboard raid controllers aren't very good to begin with. If you have to have a raid in your desktop, use a dedicated card instead. You can bring the card with you when you change machines and everything should come along fine. Also keep in mind that raid 1 isn't really there for data protection, only redundancy. If you delete or corrput a file on one drive, the same thing happens on the other.

Daedalus

stigweard wrote: »

Onboard raid controllers aren't very good to begin with. If you have to have a raid in your desktop, use a dedicated card instead. You can bring the card with you when you change machines and everything should come along fine. Also keep in mind that raid 1 isn't really there for data protection, only redundancy. If you delete or corrput a file on one drive, the same thing happens on the other.

I dunno about you, but I loose a lot more data from a hard drive dying than I do from accidentally deleting stuff.

Still, I'm sure the reverse is true for plenty of people.