Raid Controller Question

Gomo · January 14, 2020

Hello all,

I've recently purchased a "new" (used) raid controller "LSI 9260-8i" and was wondering if I there's a way to use my normal HDD's & SSD's as they were (each in raid 0, separately) without formatting the drives? I'd like to have all my drives connected to the raid controller & setup raid 1 and whatnot later. If it's possible, how? Thanks in advance!

Windows7ge · January 14, 2020

~~Perhaps some exist in the enterprise space but most RAID controllers only allow you to create one RAID volume on the card not multiple.~~ If you want multiple RAID volumes you may want to consider software RAID.

Gomo · January 14, 2020

2 minutes ago, Windows7ge said:

Perhaps some exist in the enterprise space but most RAID controllers only allow you to create one RAID volume on the card not multiple. If you want multiple RAID volumes you may want to consider software RAID.

I think you didn't understand my question.. I was asking if I could use my drives as they are without formatting them (every drive is in RAID 0 or well, without a raid). And creating multiple RAID configurations is possible on almost every single raid controller card.

GDRRiley · January 14, 2020

3 minutes ago, Windows7ge said:

Perhaps some exist in the enterprise space but most RAID controllers only allow you to create one RAID volume on the card not multiple. If you want multiple RAID volumes you may want to consider software RAID.

what? I've had a card run 4 raid 0s at once

to op, no they will need to be reformatted and added to the pool.

Windows7ge · January 14, 2020

3 minutes ago, Gomo said:

I think you didn't understand my question.. I was asking if I could use my drives as they are without formatting them (every drive is in RAID 0 or well, without a raid).

Seeing as how each RAID controller is unique you will most likely need to recreate the pool on the new card. Back the data up then transfer it over.

5 minutes ago, Gomo said:

And creating multiple RAID configurations is possible on almost every single raid controller card.

4 minutes ago, GDRRiley said:

what? I've had a card run 4 raid 0s at once

My bad. Didn't double-check myself so I wreaked myself. (Software RAID aficionado)

Quote

Creating Multiple RAIDs in LSI 9260-8i controller card (A whole guide on it)

alpha754293 · February 5, 2020

On 1/14/2020 at 4:45 PM, Gomo said:

I was asking if I could use my drives as they are without formatting them (every drive is in RAID 0 or well, without a raid).

I'm confused.

Are they in RAID0 or are they in a JBOD configuration?

If they're in RAID0, (with maybe the exception of ZFS), the answer is most likely going to be no.

The RAID0 configuration is stored on the controller and only some enterprise controllers will allow you to export and import configurations. Most don't.

WIth ZFS, you can probably offline and export the pool to allow it to be imported, but there are likely other catches to that.

So, the short answer is no. The slightly longer answer is maybe, but it might take quite a bit of work. And if you don't have backups of your data, it would be strongly advised to make a backup of your data while you are trying to administer the RAID array because it can be possible that in the midst of trying to configure it, you can toast the RAID array configuration, and therefore; lose all of your data on the RAID array.

If it is a hardware RAID controller, (e.g. Broadcom/Avago/LSI -- you most definitely can create multiple RAID arrays (which they call virtual drives) for sure. (Some of their RAID HBAs will consider JBODs as individual virtual drives, e.g. a "RAID array" with one drive each.) Each array will have then be initialized by the RAID HBA and presented to the OS as a single device, which will then need to be formatted before you can put data on it.

Again, there ARE exceptions with ZFS, but there are also limitations as well.

For example, if you have ZFS on root, and it's in a mirrored root zpool, migrating that is going to be very tricky especially if you have a hardware change because you will want to and need to mount the zfs pool in order to be able update the configuration file with the new hardware, but the mounting of said zfs pool will likely be unsuccessful if you didn't update the hardware before preparing the zfs pool to be exported and taken offline for the migration.

In other words, you probably CAN do it, but it would be some rather advanced ZFS administration steps that I generally wouldn't recommend people try to do unless you have a LOT of experience with ZFS administration and/or you don't particularly care if you loose the data on your zfs pool.

But in short, for the most part, the answer to your question is "no".