Are all MoBo RAID 1s created equal?

[stockhausen]

Most modern motherboards offer RAID 0 & 1 on the SATA ports.

What puzzles me is if you have say a Gigabyte motherboard with two 1TB SATA HDDs in a RAID 1 (mirrored) configuration and one of the HDDs fails:

• Could you connect the remaining HDD to some other motherboard (e.g. MSI or Asus) and still read it?
• Come to that, would you be able to read the data off that HDD installed as a normal SATA drive on any motherboard?
• Does the SATA RAID depend on the specific controller chip and/or configuration data stored on the disk?

Has anyone actually tried this in a real world (i.e. not theoretical) situation.

Much the same sort of question would apply to RAID 5 & RAID 10 but RAID 1 is the simplest scenario.

 

[fross]

Not sure why you're asking about moving that drive to another machine etc.

If you have a RAID 1 setup, and one of the drives fails, you are still able to read/write to the setup, it'll just go to the one remaining drive. No need to remove it from that machine, it will keep functioning.

When you replace the broken drive with a new one, you have the ability to sync the drives to make it a copy of the old one.

 

[NathanE]

RAID 1 is a very simple type of array. If a failure occurs you can take the remaining disk and bring it up on another PC if you choose. There's nothing special about the data of the disk that would make that undoable.

Secondly, there's not really such a thing as "fake raid" when it comes to RAID 1. The Intel ICHxR implementation of RAID 1 is very very good.

As long as you steer clear from things like JMicron and arguably even Silicon Image. Stick with "known good" driver vendors like Intel and Nvidia. You shouldn't go far wrong.

Intel's ICHxR tend to support forward upgrades. So if you upgraded your motherboard and plugged in all the disks as before, then they should all be detected exactly as they were before. This is because ICHxR stores all its settings in a small reserved space at the start of each of the member disks.

 

[stockhausen]

Not sure why you're asking about moving that drive to another machine etc. ...

Fair question; let me describe an alternative scenario . . .

If you have say a Gigabyte motherboard (e.g. a GA-P55A-UD3) with two 1TB SATA HDDs in a RAID 1 (mirrored) configuration and the motherboard fails:

• could you connect the remaining HDDs to some other motherboard (e.g. MSI or Asus) and still read it?
• come to that, would you be able to read the data off one or both of those HDDs installed on any (non Gigabyte) motherboard?
• does the SATA RAID depend on the specific controller chip and/or configuration data stored on the disk(s)?

My question relates really to the degree of dependence on a specific motherboard and chipset to allow reading from one or both mirrored disks.


I take it from the reply above that this configuration should be relatively safe since it relies on an Intel P55 Express Chipset?

 

[spleenharvester]

It's saved in the exact same way mate. Just to two disks.