Raid Migration

T

thurstmw

Weaksauce
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Feb 9, 2011
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I have a 3tb Raid 0 just two 1.5 tb drives. I use it as a HTPC/ File server for my house. Currently it is in a box I have rocking a 3.4ghz P4 with windows 7. The video encoding is not quite fast enough with this for it to handle 1080 mkvs so I was thinking about moving the raid to another box with a dual core amd of some kind. The mother board on the P4 box was lacking in sata ports so I have the drives raided through a PCIe raid card but if i remember correctly the cards drivers did not support NTFS so it was either use FAT and loose a lot of my space or software raid the drives. I software raided of course.

If I move this raid to a new box will the raid rebuild its self automatically? If not what would I need to do to have it rebuild its self? Do I need to know the block size I used etc...?

Also... The boot drive is a different drive these just have movies etc on them.

Thanks
 
Honestly I'm confused as why the card can't handle different file systems

What kind of budget do you have? If I were you I would definitely think about setting up a new system, properly, instead of migrating over an array
My 2 cents
 
Since you aren't running Linux, I'm not sure why it won't support NTFS.

EDIT: Ok, you should be able to move the drives to another Windows 7 installation without having to rebuild.

Since you are just using RAID 1, this will make things easy and at most in may have to resyncronize (not rebuild).

Though if I were you, you might give FakeRAID a try as it will drastically increase the read speeds when using RAID 1, where as software RAID in Linux/Windows/OS X won't net any performance gains that I am aware of.
 
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vraa said:
Honestly I'm confused as why the card can't handle different file systems

What kind of budget do you have? If I were you I would definitely think about setting up a new system, properly, instead of migrating over an array
My 2 cents
Click to expand...
When I boot to the bios raid setup for the card it wont let me raid the drives if they are in NTFS and will only format them to FAT. I am not sure either. I basically just set up the cheapest server possible.

The new system would be built on a shuttle barebones which I got from a friend for free with a busted PSU. The raid card was ~15 dollars. My goal is to basically put no money into this except a 35 dollar dual core cpu.
 
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Red Falcon said:
Since you aren't running Linux, I'm not sure why it won't support NTFS.

EDIT: Ok, you should be able to move the drives to another Windows 7 installation without having to rebuild.

Since you are just using RAID 1, this will make things easy and at most in may have to resyncronize (not rebuild).

Though if I were you, you might give FakeRAID a try as it will drastically increase the read speeds when using RAID 1, where as software RAID in Linux/Windows/OS X won't net any performance gains that I am aware of.
Click to expand...
Ok thanks for the reply. It is RAID 0 though not RAID 1. Will this make a difference? The read speed is not a major concern for me.
 
Apparently you are not using software RAID, you are using FakeRAID if you have to build the array from within the BIOS/firmware of the card itself.

Format shouldn't matter, just let the controller put them to FAT, then once you are in the OS, format the drive container to NTFS.

I thought, from your description, you were using the Windows software RAID, which RAID 1 would have no benefits, but since you are using FakeRAID then RAID 1 would have the read benefits. Since you are using RAID 0, don't even worry about it. ;)

As for transporting the drives between systems, just make sure you have your RAID controller card installed along side of the HDDs being used, otherwise the RAID array won't transfer.
 
Sorry I wasent very clear. I ended up not setting up the RAID through the BIOS because it would only format in FAT so it wouldn't show up more than 2TB in windows. So I ended up setting up the RAID through disk management in windows after formatting each drive in NTFS.
 
thurstmw said:
Sorry I wasent very clear. I ended up not setting up the RAID through the BIOS because it would only format in FAT so it wouldn't show up more than 2TB in windows. So I ended up setting up the RAID through disk management in windows after formatting each drive in NTFS.
Click to expand...

Ah, I see. ;)

Like my above post, it should be transferable to another system as long as you are running windows and as long as the OS itself is not installed on the array. Because it is RAID 0, it should work instantly. RAID1 and RAID5 may have to resync, but it would still work.

I'm not sure why your controller wouldn't like NTFS, but the controller itself will not be capable of formatting the drives to NTFS.

If you do it again, make sure to just let the controller create the array, then format it through windows.

For RAID 0 though, it should preform the same in either FakeRAID or software RAID.
 
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