Remove Raid 1 Hard Drives and Put into another Computer

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solaris54

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I want to remove Raid 1 WD 1TB hard drives from computer and put into another computer. I'm not sure if I want to leave them in Raid when I put them into the new computer or have them as separate drives.

Can I leave the data on them and just put them into the new computer? I will assign the same drive letter as the old computer. Seems like the same data should be on each drive.
 
No it is not the boot drive.

So would everything be alright whether I put them back in Raid 1 or made them separate drives?
 
Thats where things can get a bit.... complicated.
In my experience breaking an array and recreating it means you have to reformat the drives. Especially when moving to a new controller on in this case motherboard (i assume)

Is it onboard RAID or a RAID card?
 
This would be paired with a eVGA 780 FTW mobo so onboard raid controller. Im still not sure that I will go Raid again but just exploring options.
 
I know little about that MB, but i'm almost 100 certain that it will require a reformat if you go raid unless its the same controller and it can recognize the drives as marked for a raid 1 array.

If it were me, I'd keep them separate and use a program, batch script, or manually by hand copy data from one to the other for a backup. Simpler, and you wont have to rebuild any arrays in the event of a failure. Plus onboard raid controllers offload all their work to the CPU anyway, so a nightly backup or something would be a much better solution.
 
If you are not using the same RAID controller and possibly the same BIOS for it (and maybe driver software), you are likely to have difficulty getting the RAID array to survive on another system.
Its one of the disadvantages of using onboard RAID.
If you split the array, the data is lost, the drives are not readable without each other and the original RAID controller or very close equivalent.
 
I will probably just install them and see what happens. Should be interesting.
 
solaris54 said:
I will probably just install them and see what happens. Should be interesting.
Click to expand...

Be aware that plugging the array onto another controller may hose it.
If you have anything valuable, back it up.
 
If your controller allows you to move the array, then yes, everything will work fine.
 
This is what I would do.

Pull one drive from the raid 1 array. Reformat that pulled drive. Connect the drive back up to the system, pull remaining raid 1 array data off the drive onto the newly formatted drive.

Once complete, then kill the last drive in the array and format it also... now you can use both drives in any system while still retaining your data and getting rid of the raid 1 function.
 
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