Can I switch a Raid drive ?

[Matt351]

Hi,

I've got a motherboard (MSI K7N2 Delta-ISLR) with a built in promise raid controller which currently has a single SATA drive in a 1+0 stripe configuration (I don't think it makes any sense with a single drive, but that's the configuration it's in for some reason).

From time to time, the raid controller doesn't seem to be recognised on power up and I'm concerned that at some point it will fail completely. The question I've got, is whether the actual storage format on the drive is in any way linked to the particular controller or whether I could just take the drive, plug it into another SATA RAID controller and read the data from the drive. I don't want to end up with a drive I can't get the data off.

Incidentally, if anyone's got any suggestions on why the raid controller might be going screwy and how to fix it that would be very useful.

In anticipation....

Matt

 

[semi-pro waster]

Welcome to the forums, Raid0+1 shouldn't be used for a single drive, as you said it makes no sense, in fact I wasn't even aware it could be possible unless someone partitioned your drive into 4 then put into into that configuration for reasons that are entirely beyond my understanding.

I'd imagine you could simply plug the drive into another SATA port and it should work in this case because I suspect it isn't a properly constituted Raid array and that might be some of the problem but although you can occasionally swap round drives (all of them for a certain Raid array) to another Raid controller they generally have to be of the same controller chip. In light of this I'd hesitate to say just go for it unless you have some way of backing up first (DVD or similar) or unless someone else would like to come along and confirm my thoughts.