Migrating LSI RAID Card and all drives to a new PC

[dalekphalm]

My current Server is running on some old hardware - a dual core Xeon running on the LGA775 platform, with Windows Home Server 2011 running on top. It's a pretty old platform, and I have some (slightly) newer hardware I'd like to use.

 

However, I don't want to rebuild my array. I have an LSI 8888ELP RAID Card, hooked directly into a Rackable SE3016 SAS expander - all the HDD's in question are in the SAS expander. (6 of them, of various capacities right now)

 

I'd like to know if I can simply take out the RAID Card, drop it into a new computer (Installing drivers, of course), hook up the SAS Expander, and will the OS be able to just see all my drives? Is there any special requirement for migrating a RAID Card and existing config to a new computer?

[xBlizzDevious]

Label each of the drives and cables and make sure you plug them back in in the same order, but you should be just fine. I've not had experience with LSI cards so can't guarantee it, but it worked fine for my Highpoint RocketRAID card.

[dalekphalm]

1 minute ago, xBlizzDevious said:

Label each of the drives and cables and make sure you plug them back in in the same order, but you should be just fine. I've not had experience with LSI cards so can't guarantee it, but it worked fine for my Highpoint RocketRAID card.

Labelling everything shouldn't be a problem. All the drives are in the SAS Expander, and it's just a single SFF-8088 cable from Port "A" on the RAID Card to Port "1" on the SAS Expander.

 

I did find out last night after swapping out a dead hard drive, that it IS important to put the cable back into Port "A" on the RAID card though Windows didn't see any of the drives. But swapping the cable back to "A" and rebooting, and bam, there they were again.

[Jarsky]

Swapping should be fine, your drives only care about the RAID controller. The main thing is as @xBlizzDevious pointed out,make certain you plug the drives back into the correct port number. Software RAID's don't matter, as it identifies its place by 'RAID data' on the disks.

[leadeater]

Yes you can move the RAID card to a new system and it will work fine. It's one of the nice things about hardware RAID is that the array is system independent and can be moved very easily.

[scottyseng]

Yep, it'll be fine. I moved my drives from my desktop PC (Which was using SAS to sata breakout cables) to a server chassis with a backplane. I'm honestly not sure if I actually did put the drives back in the right order, but the RAID card picked it up even though I had it on a backplane now via a SAS to SAS expander built into the backplane. It is a nice feature of a hardware RAID card.

[leadeater]

3 hours ago, scottyseng said:

Yep, it'll be fine. I moved my drives from my desktop PC (Which was using SAS to sata breakout cables) to a server chassis with a backplane. I'm honestly not sure if I actually did put the drives back in the right order, but the RAID card picked it up even though I had it on a backplane now via a SAS to SAS expander built into the backplane. It is a nice feature of a hardware RAID card.

SAS/SATA RAID doesn't actually care about port ID's etc as long as all disks are present on the controller, only old parallel SCSI cared and that was more of a SCSI thing than RAID.

[dalekphalm]

Thanks everyone for confirming what I hoped was the case! I will likely open a thread to document my upgrades when I get the chance. Moving soon though, so not sure if it'll be before or after the move.