Software RAID 1 question, dissimilar hardware

[Chris Wilson]

The more I try and learn about backups and safe storage the questions I have.

Here's my latest. I have two identical SATA III 1 Gb hard drives, designated "D: Drive" under Win 7 64 bit Pro. They are under an Intel software RAID 1 on a Gigabyte GA-Z97X-Gaming 3 motherboard. All appears well. I have the OS and my two mail apps on C: Drive which is an SSD drive. I use Second Copy to back up both mail apps to the RAID 1 D drives each night. I also use Z-DBackup to make a system image of the Crive once a week, which it creates on the RAID1 pair. The RAID 1 pair (D: Drive) with the system image is backed up to LTO4 tape once a week.

What happens if on of the RAID 1 pair of SATA III drives fails? I guess the Intel software RAID flags a fault? I then have to work out which of the 2 drives is dead, and swap it out? What if an identical drive is no longer available? Will any 1 Gb or larger SATA III drive work? Does the RAID rebuild occur automagically? How long might one expect it to take to rebuild the new drive?

With a truly unlucky chain of events, leaving the PC totally dead or missing, say from a power surge, theft or whatever, and I just have my tape, how do I go about getting the Crive image from it to a new PC I wish to run the same version of Window ? Do I run a repair or installation disc, load the tape deck drivers and the SCSI card drivers (it runs on SCSI on an Adaptec card), then will there be enough "stuff" on the new PC to load the Z-Dat software and restore from said tape? I guess I should be brave and "create" a fault and see if it all works *BEFORE* a real world failure...

As an aside, if the motherboard croaked and I had to replace it with a currently available one, can I be reassured another board would still read the software RAID 1 created hard drive pair that the current board is running?

Thanks for reading and for any replies.

Thanks for reading and for any replies.

 

[Grrrrr]

Look into Stablebit Drive Pool or Drive Bender. If your aim is just having a duplicate copy of data then it's a much better and much more flexible solution than software RAID.

You can

• use any number of different sized drives
• add new drives to the pool whenever you like (without having to format or rebuild or anything). With an extra drive you could choose to triple duplicate your files if you're particularly paranoid or just use the extra space.
• All files are kept in the normal windows folder structure, so you could remove any of the drives and pop it any windows PC and it could read the data on it

Plenty of people on OcUK swear by stablebit drive pool, do a quick search...

 

[Frozennova]

To stick to answering the original question.

No the specifics of the drive won't matter as long as its the same size or larger it doesn't matter what make/model, spindle speed etc it is