Re: RAID question

How much disk space does he have? If he has 640GB... he has NO redundancy. If he has 320GB he has RAID0+mirroring. Which means two RAID0 arrays mirrored to each other. If he replaces one drive at a time he might as well replace both drives in a raid0 array as they will have to be rebuilt and initialized period. He will be VERY vulnerable during the rebuild as its going to stress the good set and the sheer time involved while the machine is running... scary.

BACKUPS are a must!

From WikiPedia (yeah I know its not god ...but its a good starting point)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID-0

A RAID 0 (also known as a stripe set or striped volume) splits data evenly across two or more disks (striped) with no parity information for redundancy. RAID 0 was not one of the original RAID levels and provides no data redundancy. RAID 0 is normally used to increase performance, although it can also be used as a way to create a small number of large virtual disks out of a large number of small physical ones.

Reliability SUCKS on RAID0.

There is *ZERO* parity.

Pulling out 160GB disks and putting in 1TB disks... only works on real raid controllers that can back fill once all the drives are the same size. And then if NTFS can handle the larger size with the original block size set on the initial format...

I think it would be better to just get a 2TB external drive and backup everything there... then rebuild the machine with proper RAID using the 1TB drives. Doing a 3 drive RAID5 + 1 hot spare *OR* make two mirrored arrays of 1TB drives each, then RAID0 them together.

Since he won't be me... he is likely to have better luck.

The best way to make RAID0 arrays is to make redundant arrays first and the make the RAID 0 setup. I still think he is nuts for no backups.

He has 4 160GB SATA drives installed. They show up as 2 160GB drives on Windows Server 2003. I gather that you are saying that since I can only see half the installed drives that it is doing mirroring. If I pulled all 4 drives and replaced them with 1 TB drives, should I have 2 1TB mirrored drives? Is there something on Windows server that allows me to look at the controller configuration or is this a plug and play sort of setup? I was thinking that I could clone his disks to another networked machine and switch all the disks, then clone back to the original.
I've been trying to find information on the Dell website about the controller but it doesn't have anything for the description, part number or item number. I have a copy of his packing slip for the numbers. The controller is described as Item Number 341-6883 Add-In SAS 6/iR (SATA/SAS Controller)- RAID0, Supports 2-4 Hot Plug Hard Drives Part Number GP327. I can't find any info on that particular part whatsoever. Googling for SAS 6/iR gets me a pdf from Dell that indicates the SAS 6/iR family supports both RAID0 and RAID1. I guess I've got to go back and see if I can find a utility to check the controller. If he's got the smaller disks mirrored, he HAS to be in RAID1, right?
I've got him backing up daily to a removable drive so his data is safe. Of course we haven't tried to restore from the backups so it's not THAT safe...

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