Raid Questions...

[gamesaregood]

Hello Everyone,

I've got a PC which i use to keep most of my files on and am considering setting up raid 5 in it for some redundancy...

As the PC is only used as a file store write speeds are not a major concern as i understand these are slower with raid 5... I have a Asus M2N-VM DH motherboard with onboard - 4 x Serial ATA 3.0Gb/s support RAID 0, 1, 5, 0+1, JBOD using a JMicron JMB363 controller.

I have a few questions and "what ifs":

What if i use the onboard controller and want to change / upgrade the motherboard, is there any safe way of moving it onto another board without loosing all my data?

What if a hard drive dies, how do it let you know this? I presume it would be the case of replacing it with another drive the same and it will rebuilt the array?

What if i purchased a cheap PCI/ PCI-E raid controller, would this make changing motherboards in the future any more easy?

I'm considering 4x 500GB Drives at mo to give me 1.5TB of usable space.

Thanks,

Michael

 

[rpstewart]

What if i use the onboard controller and want to change / upgrade the motherboard, is there any safe way of moving it onto another board without loosing all my data?

Yes, you move the disks onto the new board, create a new array and restore from your backups - remember RAID5 is not a backup.

There are certain circumstances when you can move the array intact. Normally this is only possible if the RAID controllers are the same (or very similar) and even then it's nto guaranteed.

What if a hard drive dies, how do it let you know this? I presume it would be the case of replacing it with another drive the same and it will rebuilt the array?

The controller will tell you that a drive has died. All you do is remove the dead one and replace it, the controller will do the rest. It's a good idea to mark the cables with the appropriate port number so that you don't pull the wrong drive and break the whole array.

What if i purchased a cheap PCI/ PCI-E raid controller, would this make changing motherboards in the future any more easy?

Yes, it's much easier but I'd avoid PCI cards. Not only are they bandwidth limited but there's no guarantee that PCI slots will be around much longer which kind of defeats the purpose of the add in card.