Move software raid array among computers

[bakua]

Hey guys,

 

I'm getting tired of having 7 different drives in their own enclosures and fiddling with what's where all the time. I've found out that I have three solutions. NAS, dummy HDD enclosure, HDD enclosure with HW raid.

 

NAS is not suitable for my use case, since I won't use the solution for my home network only. I have to be able to access it from different computers, on different locations. Internet transfer speeds are way to low, and multiple access at the same time is not an requirement.

 

This leaves me with some HDD box enclosure. I was looking at Enclosure without RAID controller and Enclosure with RAID controller. With the later one, I preset RAID option on box, put drives in and I am good to go on any computer. Dat hw raid controller though... With the first one, after I plug the box to my PC, I have to create software RAID, piece of cake.

 

My question is, since I prefer software RAID, will I be able to easily take to box and plug it to another computer? I mean, after I set it up for the first time, is it just plug and play ever since? Or do I have to do some setup every time for all computers I want to use it on? Windows only PCs, RAID 5.

 

Thanks

bakua

 

[Enderman]

why cant you just buy a bigger drive?

there are 8 and 10TB drives, and more coming soon

[EmeraldFlame]

18 minutes ago, bakua said:

My question is, since I prefer software RAID, will I be able to easily take to box and plug it to another computer? I mean, after I set it up for the first time, is it just plug and play ever since? Or do I have to do some setup every time for all computers I want to use it on? Windows only PCs, RAID 5.

This isn't going to work very well. It can work under certain circumstances, but it would be a pain. If you were using the same chipset across all computers you were plugging it into it would likely work. However, between chipsets there are normally changes to the software raid controller that make them incompatible with older versions. This isn't always the case, but it is the case the majority of the time. So if you have one system that is running skylake and another that is running sandy bridge, it is extremely unlikely that it would work, they simply wouldn't be able to read each other's volumes.

Also software RAID 5 is pretty terrible in write performance and I wouldn't recommend it. You really need a dedicated card to get good performance out of RAID 5 and 6 because of the calculation overhead the parity bits create.

[bakua]

21 hours ago, Enderman said:

why cant you just buy a bigger drive?

there are 8 and 10TB drives, and more coming soon

So you think getting 1x 8TB with an enclosure is a better option? What if the drive dies? With RAID, I would have at least a way to somehow resurrect the data,

[bakua]

21 hours ago, EmeraldFlame said:

Also software RAID 5 is pretty terrible in write performance and I wouldn't recommend it. You really need a dedicated card to get good performance out of RAID 5 and 6 because of the calculation overhead the parity bits create.

I mostly care about read speeds though.

[Enderman]

3 minutes ago, bakua said:

So you think getting 1x 8TB with an enclosure is a better option? What if the drive dies? With RAID, I would have at least a way to somehow resurrect the data,

well you could buy two of them and make regular backups

a lot safer than raid

even raid 1 or 5 or 10 can crap out sometimes (like what happened to linus)