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May 5th, 2007, 05:31 AM
#1
Modifying a raid array
I have trying to track down some information on changing a raid array (in this case a raid 1 mirror) to another raid type.
Senario:
A guy at my worked had his system crash. So I thought that it might be a good idea to set him up in a raid 1 array so if it happened again it would be an easy swap the drive and go solution.
The one issue I didn't plan on is the performance hit the computer takes from a raid 1 array. Since this guy uses high end graphics programs like Maya, Motionbuilder, etc he is pushing and pulling data all over his computer and it has to write to both drives when he does anything. This has actually made his computer just about the slowest one in the office. I was thinking I could set him up in a raid 0 array which would drastically improve his performance.
Can I modify his raid volume from a raid 1 to raid 0? Is this possible without losing data or do I need to put in another hard drive so I do not lose the data currently on his mirrored array?
The raid software (intel storage manager) allows me to modify the raid, but warns me all data may be lost if I proceed with this raid change. Does anyone have any experience in this area? Should I get another hard drive for backup purposes or can it really just modify the raid volume from 1 to 0?
It's not a war on drugs it's a war against personal freedoms!
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May 5th, 2007, 06:27 AM
#2
play it safe and do a backup, then go ahead and change it to raid0
this day in age you can never be to sure
also make sure to check that the backup is infact working. You don't wanna change it to find that it fruits up, and then find the backup copy isn't a backup copy...
cheers
acidtone..
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May 5th, 2007, 06:31 AM
#3
AFAIK the only way you would be able to do it would be to back up all his data to separate media. Changing the raid level will cause the drives to have to be reinitialized, thus wiping them completely.
IMHO I believe you are looking past the fact that his raid setup did its job perfectly. As I am sure your aware, had the drive failure occured on a RAID 0 you wouldn't be looking at a simple way to recover the data.
May be it would be possible to first repair the existing raid, add 2 new drives on a seperate raid volume and pull his data over from the other volume (after it has been repaired)
You can find good information concerning raid levels at the following link.
http://www.acnc.com/04_01_00.html
"I have died, I will die, It's alright, I don't mind"
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May 6th, 2007, 08:25 AM
#4
Might I suggest that you read up on RAID arrays and what they do?
ANY RAID configuration is going to be slower than a single disk system. Even RAID 0 will be slower.
In the environment you describe I would say that RAID 0 would be little short of suicidal. lose one disk and you have lost the lot, and it won't be economically recoverable.
I have an idea that might be of interest to you. You can get software to make an image of your HDD. This could be user driven or scheduled, or both. Maybe if the guy did this when he went to lunch and when he went home he would only have half a days work at risk.
I presume that most of the production work gets saved to a server when he finishes working with it? so he may not even risk losing that much?
Incidentally, if you remove one of the mirrored drives the system should revert to being a single drive setup and run much faster
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