Moving RAID to new server question

BarmyYeTTi · 27 Jun 2009 at 12:50

Currently I have 4x 750Gb drives in RAID5 on my P5Q-E motherboard.

But I have just bought a Synology 407 Cubestation from DoctorBob.
Can I expect a miracle, just drop the drives straight in to the 407 and they will work?

Or do I need to back it all up and recreate the RAID on the 407?
Or another way?

Cheers

taliesyn · 27 Jun 2009 at 12:56

Unless it uses the same chipset as your on-board RAID, which I think is fairly unlikely, then it's a backup and restore job I'm afraid.

BarmyYeTTi · 27 Jun 2009 at 13:06

bugger! was worth a try.

rpstewart · 27 Jun 2009 at 13:11

It's definitely a backup and restore job, the NAS needs the disks formatted as EXT3 for a start...

taliesyn · 27 Jun 2009 at 13:15

rpstewart said:
It's definitely a backup and restore job, the NAS needs the disks formatted as EXT3 for a start...

There is that too

I'm not familiar with the specific NAS model, but they are generally Linux based

It is indeed a pain. I have the same problem with a 3Ware SATA RAID system I have to set up next week in that I have to backup and restore an entire drive

BarmyYeTTi · 27 Jun 2009 at 13:32

just as well the the full 2TB isnt full, only 400Gb thankfully!
I can handle that.

rpstewart · 27 Jun 2009 at 14:04

BarmyYeTTi said:
just as well the the full 2TB isnt full, only 400Gb thankfully!
I can handle that.

Simple then, yank one of the 750s and let the RAID5 array run degraded while you copy everything onto the single 750 (the trick here will be to encourage the mobo RAID controller not to rebuild instantly). Then the 3 disks go into the NAS, let it build a 3 disk RAID5 array then copy everything from the single 750 onto the NAS. Finally add the fourth disk into the NAS and let it do an only the fly array expansion (which might take a while).

therealnerd2 · 27 Jun 2009 at 20:50

taliesyn said:
Unless it uses the same chipset as your on-board RAID

Don't forget, same chipset and same firmware. I made that mistake swapping drives from one board to another identical board with no luck. Turned out a firmware update had moved the metadata :rolleyes: