Hardware

Ask something
Discussion Locked

RAID 1 and Existing PC

0 helpful
11 replies

by paul7410 1 view

Closed to new repliesThis discussion is closed. It stays readable, but it takes no new replies.

I have a SOHO (peer - peer). Last week I had one of my workstations go down. Now I need to do two things
a) purchase a new computer
b) Add Raid 1 (disk duplexing) to main computer

My question is... should I purchase a new computer with built in RAID 1 controllers and reformat the main comptuer. Or is it possible to add RAID 1 (duplexing) to an existing PC and not have to reformat and reinstall on existing EIDE drive? So new drive would update with image of existing drive and then have same data from there on out?

ALso if you know of any vendors you would recommend if possible.

11 replies

by thechas

You should be able to implement RAID level 1 on an existing installation IF you can find an identical hard drive.

RAID 1 works best if both / all drives in the array are the same make and model.

At a minimum, the drives should have the same capacity. If the 2nd drive is larger, the extra capacity is LOST!

Since you need another PC anyway, I would start from scratch and setup the new PC as the main computer with 2 or more identical drives.

Whether you use an on-board or PCI RAID controller is a personal choice.

If you are using the main PC as a file server, I would seriously consider SCSI drives with a SCSI RAID solution.

You can keep the old main PC running until you get the new PC configured and the files transfered.Chas

by paul7410

Thanks for the help. I ended up purchasing a new machine and installed two 120GB SATA drives with RAID 1 - yes it is disk mirroring b/c cheaper (would rather disk duplexing but dell did not offer)... anyways, thanks for all the help.

by walid sabra

The best Solution is to get 2 new Indentical HDD Instead to a new PC if you couldn't find an Indential HDD for the existing one

by cul8rm8e

Regarding your fiest answer to this post,this is not correct when you say that if the second drive is of larger capacity that you will loose the additional drive space.

I have this setup on my own server using 1x20gig and 1x40gig with with 5 freevolumes of 4gig free space.

just my own comment.

by cul8rm8e

Regarding your fiest answer to this post,this is not correct when you say that if the second drive is of larger capacity that you will loose the additional drive space.

I have this setup on my own server using 1x20gig and 1x40gig with with 5 freevolumes of 4gig free space.

just my own comment.

by pctech

Back up your data! Always!
Disk duplexing involves two controllers. The raided drives are on seperate controllers, in the even a controller fails you will still be running on the other controller. This is just further redundancy.
Once you have your data backed up, any experiments that fail are merely a nuisance. Yes, you are experimenting any time you make a hardware and/or software change, especially as radical as what you propose. All will probably go well, but prepare for the worst.
I agree, identical drives are a better bet than different drives. You are more likely to have similar, if not the same speed between drives and the slowest drive will always determine the speed of a raid array.

This discussion is closed to new replies.