Preserving RAID data.

[Exit Stage Left]

My old PC has died. The engineer says the power supply and MoBo have gone. It has a striped RAID. Can I configure a RAID array on another PC, using a couple of spare drives and then use that new array to read the old RAID?

[perpetual dan]

Does the existing controller still work or is it built into the motherboard? Just moving it and disks over sounds simplest to me.

Is the spare drives idea that you would set something up that looks like the old array to get the config and then swap the disks to get the data?Its a long time since I had to do this, but that sounds more complicated than necessary (and may well get confused if the disks were different).

[Kim]

Just build a new array and restore the data from backups.

If you were running RAID0 without backups then you didn't really care about the data, right?

Realistically, your chances of reading the data without the same breed of RAID controller aren't good.  So if it was software RAID, then your plan will probably work, otherwise you're going to need to find some reasonably identical hardware first.

If you're going to use hardware RAID, you either need a spare controller in a cupboard for when it dies (because you can bet it'll be obsolete by then) or to plan for an unrecoverable controller failure.  Software RAID avoids this problem (and tends to be a lot less fussy about matching disks, too), at the cost of a little CPU overhead.  CPU is cheap.

[plum]

I recently took a 8212 PCI/IDE RAID board out of a box. No good to me any more so if you need a spare you can have that.

Old now but drivers are still available all the way up to W7.

[itsbruce]

Was it hardware or software RAID?  (The latter quite common under Linux and the free BSDs).  The latter is designed to be portable, the former tends to have a format not only specific to the raid controller but also to the firmware version.