Can you ghost on a RAID0 or RAID1?

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DemiSheep

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I wanted to find out if it is possible to ghost a RAID0 or RAID1. Basically I want to ghost the RAID as if I were ghosting just a single drive. Anyone know if this is possible to do? With the RAID0 would I need to ghost the two drives to another RAID0? With RAID1 would I just need to ghost one of the drives to a new single drive?

Thanks,
DemiSheep
 
What does RAID have to do with ghosting?

Ghosting simply makes a copy of the files. All you should need is enough space. And the rights to copy.
 
My suggestion would be to temporarily break the raid set and clone the single drives to their replacements. Any decent raid controller should be able to reidentify the drives once they've been cloned as part of the same raid set. I've done this for a raid 0 stripe on 3 WD640's on an intel ICH9r controller and it worked out.

with raid one you should be able to clone the drive, expand the volume (if upgrading disks) and then tell the raid controller to mirror the drive. Again, I've done this with the ICH9r, however I do not know if their new management tool allows this in windows.

What does RAID have to do with ghosting?

Ghosting simply makes a copy of the files. All you should need is enough space. And the rights to copy.
Click to expand...

If you do a block level clone raid does have an impact.
 
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GeorgeHR said:
What does RAID have to do with ghosting?

Ghosting simply makes a copy of the files. All you should need is enough space. And the rights to copy.
Click to expand...

Ghosting normally is not the same as a backup. What you describe is more of a backup. Ghosting is creating an exact image of a drive or partition that can at a later time be put back on a drive or array and return you back to that state you were in when you took the image without needing to install the os and backup software first and then do a restore.
 
Triage, I don't see how you did that as a RAID0 cannot be broken. It's the only RAID (Not a real raid) that has no redundancy, no fault tolerance. If one drive fails you lose the whole raid and the data contained within.

As far as Ghosting I now have figured out you can ghost a RAID1 no problem, you just have to ghost one of the drives as both drives contain duplicate images of the data. But RAID0 is different, the drives are not duplicates, it basically merges the two drives together into one large drive with data spread across both drives.

I guess my question is with RAID0 can I hook up two other drives and ghost the RAID0 and create a new RAID0 so to speak and then put those drives into another identical machine? I would prefer to do this in the "DOS" environment using a Ghost bootdisk not in windows.

Any thoughts?

Thanks,
DemiSheep
 
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not sure why you wouldn't be able to say ghost a 2 x 150GB RAID0 to a 300GB hard drive with the clone hard drive tool from the boot cd. Have you tried booting from it and seeing what your options are?
 
You can break a raid 0 easily. Like I said, using an intel ICH9r controller, and running the system off of a clean install on another disk I pulled 2 drives and raw cloned the remaining drive to another disk. Repeat for the other 2 drives. I upgraded my 3 drive raid 0 of 640's to Samsung 1TB F3's. It works, just takes a while. With the spare space I setup a small raid 5 which stored daily backups, hooray for 3x the failure rate :p

Most dos environment tools do not play well with raid controllers unless you've added the required drivers if one is available. You also cannot do what you want with cloning the raid0 to 2 disks like that. You would need to create a new raid volume configured identically to the one you want to clone, ie if your existing raid 0 set is 2x 320GB drives w/ 64kb stripe size you would need to set it up the same for the next volume.

Best recommendation I have would be to take a spare disk, install windows clean and install ghost or acronis in the win environment. Take your 2 new disks and within the controller config pre windows match the config of the old raid. If upgrading the disks to larger capacities you can use the full disks. Then within windows clone old volume to the new one. This is all assuming your system can support 5 drives.

Edit: Demi you may want to read up more on this before proceeding, not just rely on forum advice.Its complete fud that Raid 0 sets cannot be broken nor recovered. Its just a lot more difficult and for most cases not worth doing as you should be running backups whenever dealing with raid 0. For recovery / rebuilding info, one of my favorites is: http://www.myharddrivedied.com/presentations/
Watched his talk at DefCon 17 and was definitely enjoyable and easy content level. He gives a lot more info of where to go for more as well.
 
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I have not experimented yet, I am still in the gathering information mode. Thanks for the input. I really want something easy to deal with as I have 10 machines I have to deal with and I don't want to have to remember a lengthy process after a certain amount of time has passed. I am thinking of doing RAID10 (or RAID1+0??) but that would entail buying 2 more drives times 10...

Btw do you guys know what the difference between RAID10 and RAID1+0 is?

Based on this: http://www.acnc.com/04_01_10.html and this: http://www.acnc.com/04_01_0_1.html RAID10 is better, has more advantages and less disadvantages. I saw a forum post where someone said they were the same thing and that doesn't seem to be true. RAID10 is a pair of mirrored drives with a pair of striping drives and the other is two pairs of striping drives with both pairs mirrored.

Thanks,
DemiSheep
 
Demi -

Is performance really that necessary? I can see redundancy for workstations but the raid solutions you are looking at might be overkill. Would a SSD boot volume with data store locations mapped to a raid 1 pair make more sense? Having windows + applications on the SSD, and having 1 hotswap, preimaged SSD spare at the location should take care of most issues with ~5-10 minutes of downtime.

When you run the higher raid solutions you are going to want to make sure you have a GOOD raid card, some of the cheaper add in cards and almost all onboard solutions put a lot of extra processing on the processor instead of on the raid card where it belongs. ICH9r that I use is not a good raid card for higher solutions and even with the raid 5 setup performance starts to bog down.
 
I don't know if performance is that necessary, specially when it may not be all that much, and the fact that the machines are Dual Xeon Quad Core machines with 48GB of memory. :eek:

The whole RAID thing just may be more of a hassle than anything. I don't know how much effort it would be to change the data location pointers in all the software packages.

DemiSheep
 
You should find out what the use cases for those system's are before going forward then. From that, determine what resources the applications are dependent on before deciding hard drive configurations. You should also pay attention to service contracts, maximum amount of downtime etc.

Unless those boxes disable failing DIMMs of memory(or pairs), have redundant power supplies you should expect for downtime. How much is the question - spare procs' power supplies, and memory budgeted for? Raid only accounts for 1 aspect of the total setup that needs to be examined.
 
DemiSheep said:
I don't know if performance is that necessary, specially when it may not be all that much, and the fact that the machines are Dual Xeon Quad Core machines with 48GB of memory. :eek:

The whole RAID thing just may be more of a hassle than anything. I don't know how much effort it would be to change the data location pointers in all the software packages.

DemiSheep
Click to expand...

BTW, even free clonezilla may be able to do what you are suggesting. I mean clone a partition from a Fakeraid or real hardware raid to a different array and do so in a way that makes that new array bootable. Acronis claims they can do this for hard ware raid but it is unclear about fakeraid.
 
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