MB & CPU swap when using RAID card?

PKLee · March 4, 2020

Hi guys,

I have a server/NAS which has a supermicro MB, one Xeon CPU and a MegaRAID RAID card. I just saw a great deal of a MB + dual Xeon config, I'm thinking about switching to it.

So if that happens, the RAID card and drives stay, OS drive stays, MB and CPU will have to be changed.

My question is, will I lose the RAID during this swap? Or in another word, where is the RAID configuration stored?

leadeater · March 4, 2020

RAID configuration is stored on the disks themselves as well as on the RAID card. Hardware RAID arrays can be moved between systems quite easily, typically you move the disks and the RAID card but you can also just move the disks but you have to connect the disks to a RAID card that supports the array on the disks and then import the array. Generally speaking you can move disks/an array between any LSI based RAID card happily.

Basically yes if you plug in your RAID card with the disks in to the new MB the data will be fine and you could boot the OS. Depending on the OS and the CPU generation change you might have a few problems with drivers, mainly a Windows thing but for the most part it's fine. Going from an Intel system to an AMD isn't though so OS reinstall is safer, not your situation, just an FYI.

Windows7ge · March 4, 2020

If you plan on moving the RAID card with the disks as Leadeater explained it should be plug'n'play (with some exceptions as described above). Otherwise you should be fine.

This is going to be my my own naive knowledge so I could be wrong but while transplanting it do make sure the battery is connected and do not disconnect it at any time. This will cause the card to lose your RAID configuration. This doesn't mean a data recovery service is the next step but it does mean figuring out the drive sequence and chunk-size.

But maybe hardware RAID has gotten easier since I last played with it so take that with a grain of salt.

leadeater · March 4, 2020

3 hours ago, Windows7ge said:

This is going to be my my own naive knowledge so I could be wrong but while transplanting it do make sure the battery is connected and do not disconnect it at any time. This will cause the card to lose your RAID configuration.

Not really, many RAID cards don't even support a battery, that's really for cache only but it's still good advice since there may be some cache data somehow and you don't want to lose it. RAID config is store on non-volatile EEPROM and also on the disk headers so worst case realistically is the RAID card scan the disks and important the array again and you won't have to do any configuration at all.