RAID 1 - Daft Question

[Gongalong]

Hi folks,

 

If I remove one of the two disks from a RAID 1 setup, can it be read in another system or will it only work connected to the controller?

 

Could you view a RAID 1 setup as backed up in a sense? i.e. two complete sets of data on two separate disks.

 

TIA

[Gongalong]

Actually this answers the latter question at least: Why is raid 1 not a substitute for a backup - NAS-RAID-Technologies - Storage

 

I suppose the question really is what you are trying to achieve from backup, and in most situations RAID 1 isn't going to cut it.

[Steve21]

A lot of it depends on how the controller does it. I know you can read some RAID1s in linux, as it's the type of drive format it uses won't work in Windows. (Example my NAS uses XFS format)

 

Steve

[Michael]

You could certainly read it as a slave drive in another system.

[dhicks]

If I remove one of the two disks from a RAID 1 setup, can it be read in another system or will it only work connected to the controller?

 

On a Linux software MD RAID array? Yes, easily. For a hardware RAID controller, I'm guessing you'd need an identical controller in the second machine.

 

Could you view a RAID 1 setup as backed up in a sense?

 

It's not ideal, there are better ways of going about it. What, exactly, are you trying to accomplish?

[Gongalong]

Purely just whether you could view it as backup if one of the drives failed. I appreciate it offers little else in the way of backup.

 

(More a theoretical situation than put into practice.)

[Arthur]

Purely just whether you could view it as backup if one of the drives failed.

Since RAID isn't classed as a backup even when all drives in the array are working, I would say no.

[Michael]

I'd agree with the above, RAID offers redundancy (excluding RAID 0) in the short-term to keep a system live. RAID arrays no matter how big can and do fail. Backups are still critical, including the System State to restore a DC for example.