RAID 1 Questions

Rozzy85

Rozzy85

Rozzy85

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Currently I'm using just one drive for main storage of files. It's been fine for the 6-7 years I've had it but I have been thinking of using a RAID 1 setup for that extra bit of safety. I backup regular anyway but if the drive was to fail it would be a pain to restore everything back.

I know that it creates a mirror image on each drive so that if one fails you still have the other. When this happens and one drive fails will the files on the RAID volume still be accessible when operating on just one drive or will it first have to rebuild the array on a new drive before you can?

This next one sounds stupid but I'll ask anyway. Can the RAID 1 volume on a single drive only be accessed by the RAID controller/chipset that created it? As in you couldn't access it in AHCI mode despite the complete volume being there and not striped like in RAID 0? I only ask this because in the past the motherboard has blown meaning I couldn't access the RAID volume without getting another board with the same controller.
 
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When this happens and one drive fails will the files on the RAID volume still be accessible when operating on just one drive
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Yes.

Any RAID array with redundancy will it allow you continued use while the array is rebuilt albeit with a loss of performance.

This obviously doesn't apply if more disks have failed than the redundancy allows for.

This next one sounds stupid but I'll ask anyway. Can the RAID 1 volume on a single drive only be accessed by the RAID controller/chipset that created it? As in you couldn't access it in AHCI mode despite the complete volume being there and not striped like in RAID 0?
Click to expand...

I don't know if this applies to all controllers but I recently changed the HDDs in a RAID 1 array.

The files on the old HDDs were still accessible when I put them in an external dock to format them.
 
Drive pooling software might be a better solution. Something like Drivebender or Stablebit Drivepool. It combines the capacity of two (or more) drives into a single virtual drive, then you can tell the software to duplicate files on the other drive. This is all transparent to the user. You also have the flexibility to keep adding drives as you need more capacity without having to format (like you'd have to with RAID).
 
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