Transferring RAID Arrays between Motherboards?

LeoPheonix · 2 Sep 2007 at 14:28

I am considering creating a 2TB Raid on a Asus Blitz Formula probablt RAID 10 or 5.

My question is, if i decide to update my motherboard will i need to reformat this Raid on the new board?

I currently use a highpoint ide raid card which i have transferred from machine to machine with all data intact. Of course this may not be as easy with the card?

LeoPheonix · 2 Sep 2007 at 14:52

I was hoping to use the motherboards controller as my Highpoint is IDE and I am looking to buy 4x SATA 500GB drives. However it sounds like I will have to rebuild the RAID if i changed the Motherboard (or it failed)which would be create a single point of failure in the Motherboard.

Is there any performance gains from using a dedicated RAID card? (Both at the low end and high end?)

mattyrigby00 · 2 Sep 2007 at 15:10

if the raid controller changes, the array wont work. being able to transfer the raid array is a plus of a dedicated raid card.

mk17 · 2 Sep 2007 at 18:12

I recently transferred a 3*320gb raid 5 array on a Highpoint 2310 sata card. It moved from a win32 xp pro environment to a Vista 64 Ultimate edition one without any problems. I downloaded the vista drivers and navigated to them when the array was detected in windows, no problems whatsoever.

Pandobear · 2 Sep 2007 at 18:22

The intel sata controllers have been compatible for the last few generations, so you were able to move from the ICH7R to the ICH8R and on to the ICH9R which comes with most P35 boards. Raid 5 worked ok with the ICH8R, though you could only use a maximum of four drives, even though there are 6 SATA ports. You could however, have two three drive arrays. Not the most efficent use of drives. Alternatively you could buy a dedicated card from OCuk, or second hand from the bay, which of course means you can swap between boards with ease. The dedicated cards also give the opportunity to have a 'hot spare'.