What do you do when you're RAID Controller Dies?

[statik213]

Just want to know ahead of time... in case my mobo or raid-controller dies what happens to my RAID arrays? Of what I know informatio about RAID arrays are not stored in a standardized format on the HDDs. Am I wrong?

So if my mobo crashed I probably will not be able to plug my HDDs into another mobo w/ RAID support and expect the array to come back on-line unless they are the raid controller is the same model or perhaps from the same manufacturer (LSI, Promise etc.)

So what do you do in this case?

 

[jose]

Start all over w/ a new mobo, AND recover your Backup'd data.. I'm assuming your talking about raid 0 ..

If you use raid 0 , then you better backup your data .

Regards,
Jose

 

[statik213]

OK, let me rephrase my question, say I have a Two Harddrive Mirrored RAID array on Motherboard A with Controller A. Mobo A and/or Controller A dies. Can I hook the the array up to another Mobo B with Controller B which is not neccessarily the same make or model of Controller A. Will Controller B recognize the original array?

 

[jose]

More than likely , no... You'll have to reinstall everything all over and recover your data from your backups.

Regards,
Jose

 

[statik213]

So, isn't that a huge weakness? If the drives are fine, shouldn't u be able to recover the data from it?

 

[MedicBob]

No because they are linked together (RAID 0) and act like 1 drive with the controller controlling them. If the controller dies, back luck. If the MB dies and the controller is not part of the MB you might get away with just swapping MB and reinstalling the controller.

The 2 drives have lil bits of info on them in no order that makes sense to visually ID. You won't find all the Windows files on drive 1 and the Programs files on drive 2, they will be intermingled.

Make sense?

 

[statik213]

It makes sense the data would be distributed across the physical drives... but shouldn't the controller store info. about the RAID array that each drive is a member of on each drive in the array. Storing array defintion info. only in flash mem. on the controller is ridiculously stupid.... it has to be stored on each harddrive and probably duplicated in every member of the array (in case a drive dies)....

So, shouldn't another controller be able to recover the array?

 

[mofrack]

Originally posted by: statik213
It makes sense the data would be distributed across the physical drives... but shouldn't the controller store info. about the RAID array that each drive is a member of on each drive in the array. Storing array defintion info. only in flash mem. on the controller is ridiculously stupid.... it has to be stored on each harddrive and probably duplicated in every member of the array (in case a drive dies)....

So, shouldn't another controller be able to recover the array?

OK, my experience with recovering mirrored disks when the controller dies is:

as long as you replace the controller with another one that uses the SAME CHIPSET, you should be fine.

IE, if you run a Silicon Image 3112 controller and the it dies, any other controller based on the SI 3112 SHOULD be able to read the mirror if the new controller is configured the same as the old one. IE; cluster size and order of the drives in the array.

 

[statik213]

Thanks for the info, I would have expected more robust support, but good to know where the kinks in the chain are.