Windows Software Raid

t121anf · World Chat Champion Joined: 23 Feb 2007 Karma :

I run a small server at home which uses ESXi to offer multiple VMs. One of them is freenas, another Windows 2008 R2.

I'm beginning to wish I'd just stuck with Windows for ease of configuration, i.e. to auto shutdown from a ups command requires a third VM to take the instruction, which in turn shutdowns the other VMs, then itself and finally the host. Windows can use the software provided.

My server has 4 2TB hdds, which I'd like to make 2x 4TB spans. This is possible in Windows, but my concern is what happens in the event of a server failure.

Can I remove the drives, put them in another PC and access the volume?

(Naturally they will be backed up but thats beside the point, copying 4TB of data is rarely quick.)

Stowelly · Traffic Copper Joined: 25 Oct 2009 Karma :

"my concern is what happens in the event of a server failure. " attempt to recover the raid, fail at recovering the raid, attempt to restore backup, realise you dont have a backup..... cry

t121anf · World Chat Champion Joined: 23 Feb 2007 Karma :

Sorry, just to clarify there is a 5th drive that would be running the OS. The 4 2TB drives are purely for storage and its the recovery of these I wold care about.

prawny1 · World Chat Champion Joined: 28 Jun 2005 Karma :

I suppose it all depends on what kind of raid you are using as to whether you can just access the volumes on another machine.
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t121anf · World Chat Champion Joined: 23 Feb 2007 Karma :

Not technically raid, but I an looking at spanned volumes

prawny1 · World Chat Champion Joined: 28 Jun 2005 Karma :

Would be worth imaging or having a second clone drive of your main os drive so you don't have to set everything back up if the os drive fails or gets a virus, you don't even need to have it connected up once the copy is made just have it in the case and plug in as needed to update the image.

I'm not sure whether a simple spanned drive set will be detected by a different machine though, I would hope it has the info on each drive to identify themselves correctly but since I've never done it I don't know.
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hellkat wrote:

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el_oso · World Chat Champion Joined: 17 May 2008 Karma :

software RAID should be fine.
Although I don't know what the limitations are on software RAID, I have swapped RAID volumes into different hardware and has worked fine. (as a non-bootable data drive at least)
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duhawkz · World Chat Champion Joined: 03 Dec 2006 Karma :

t121anf · World Chat Champion Joined: 23 Feb 2007 Karma :

Not to bothered about fault tolerance.

The 2 4TB volumes will be mirrors of each other, which in turn will be mirrored onto my external NAS and also a monthly export to a USB drive which is stored in a firesafe.

Pictures (which are the most important thing on the volumes) are also mirrored to Dropbox until my Samsung freebie expires then it will probably be moved to SkyDrive.

I just don't want to be in a position where Windows fucks itself and I need to copy 4TB back from my NAS/USB to the volumes.

Worst case is I'll leave them natively as 4x 2TB storing different things on each pair.