If I set JBOD on Raid Controller Do I lose Harddrive Contents?

[oow]

Ok I got a Asus Premium A8N-SLI board with 4 discs currently. I am not running RAID or anything and they run of the nforce4 controller. I wanted to use 2 of the drives on the RAID 5 Silicon controller the board has, However since it is raid I gotta create a RAID set then choose JBOD. I was wondering, if I actually did that right with drives that already have stuff on them would I lose the drives contents? Ofcourse I know if I did like Raid-0 or Raid-1 I would but if I just did JBOD would it leave the drives untouched or still do something to them. And if it did do something to them, and later on I took one of the drives out, would it no longer recognize the discs since there is just one disk instead of 2?

hmm, it seems doing some research that JBOD is actually like the opposite of partitioning abd it is for combining multiple disks to one partition. WHich is not what I want to do. Can I do JBOD and still have the 2 drives be independent or does JBOD force you to combine all the disks into one? If so is there a way to use my 2 drives and have them be independent (like F and D Drive) on the Raid 5 controller and do it without losing data and be able to take one of the drives out and access it on another PC or it is not possible?

 

[keldog7]

You need to give more information on your hardware, if you want any serious replies...you haven't even told us if your connecting the HDD via RAID or SATA...
Notwithstanding the paucity of hardware background, depending on the OS, it should be pretty transparent to access the drives. With JBOD it will be like a giant, single HDD - in fact, if the RAID controller is doing its job, the OS won't even know that it ISN'T a single physical drive.
Maybe I don't know the exact implementation of RAID on the A8NSLI premium, but I didn't think there was a dedicated "RAID 5 controller". I have an A8NSLI deluxe, and an A8N32SLI, at they just have SATA ports...actually configuring them as RAID 0,1,01 or 5 is up to the bios (and /or driver, in the situation of the RAID 5 implementation).
If you just want to access 4 drives, just plug each of them into a SATA port and boot - without getting into the RAID stuff.

 

[Ricemarine]

If you JBOD you still lose your information.

 

[oow]

the Asus SLI Deluxe/Premium DOES NOT let you plug in drives into the silicon ports and just boot up. It just doesnt work. Its like it can only work as RAID. When I plug in my drives to the silicon image ports I get an error on the silicon image bios boot screen. And then my PC refuses to boot up! Now if I disable the silicon controller in the Asus bios the silicon bios bootscreen doesnt show up and my PC boots but then the drives do not show up in windows and there is no silicon image controller/unknown device in windows hardware manager so its like it is completely disabled. That is why I thought if I created a RAID array and then do JBOD and I was wondering if doing that would allow me to use the drives individually

 

[keldog7]

hmm. In fairness, I haven't used the SI ports, so RAID functionality *only* is certainly possible. In any case, what's stopping you from using the nVidia ports? There are 4 of them. If you wanted to play with RAID, you can still create an array off nVidia ports 1&2 or 3&4... should be possible with current BIOS anyway. Regardless, I guess I don't understand why you want to use RAID to access the disks separately...

 

[oow]

the silicon controller on the asus a8n sli is RAID only. And I wanna be able to use my 2 drives as individual drives on that controller and I thought that JBOD would do it. I do not suppose on a RAID only controller there is any way to configure it so I can have 2 independent discs? The Nforce 4 controller lets me just plug in drives and use it like regular but those 4 ports are in use right now. I am running 2 harddrives and 2 DVD Serial ATA drives on the nforce 4 ports, and I wanna add two more harddrives to the silicon port. I have tried running the dvd drives on the silicon ports, they do not work and they hand my pc when I enable the silicon controlle rin the bios, and when I disable it they do not show up anywhere in windows device manager and neither does the silicon controller.