RAID Information

[carbon8ed]

I had a mobo die on me (or so I thought), my rig was on 4 x 250GB drives in RAID 0+1 on Gigabyte-P965-DS4 with the Intel ICH8R southridge (and RAID controller).

Asked lots of peeps and colleagues and unanimous answer was - If you change the chipset you'll lose all your RAID information to if you swap a mobo and keep the same chipset you'll probably lose all RAID info as well.

Some websites showed RAID migration from ordinary disk to RAID and some even said you can swap Intel chipsets and RAID 0 or RAID 1 can be migrated.

I went for the new P35 chipset which is the Intel ICH9R (having reached the conclusion that I may as well upgrade as everyone says my RAID 0+1 is lost anyway) and plugged it all in, for the hell of it I enable the Intel SATA ports for RAID and saved the BIOS.

The Intel RAID BIOS popped up and had found all 6 drives (the 4 RAIDED 250GB plus a pair of 500GB drives), it then booted straight into XP with various found new hardware but no RAID rebuild.

So with a RAID 0+1 you can change from the Gigabyte P965 to the Gigabyte P35 which is move from the ICH8R Intel Southbridge to the ICH9R Intel Southbridge without losing any RAID information.

I thought I would post this, although it is pretty specific, only because I couldn't find any real info saying RAID's can be preserved if you swap chipsets - in fact they nearly all just said 'forget it - data gone'.

Wasn't sure where to post this, but just wanted peeps to know RAID can move boards.

Cheers

[Clunk]

Good info thanks

[Splash]

And remember - RAID is NOT a substitute for offline backups.

[tinners]

great stuff, wondered about this as I am running the DS4 with Raid 1 for data on the Intel controller