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Are Disk Utility RAID0 arrays portable between enclosures?

VirtualRain

VirtualRain

macrumors 603
Original poster
Aug 1, 2008
6,304
118
Vancouver, BC
I'm curious if anyone knows the answer to this... If you setup a RAID0 array in disk utility and move the drives from one JBOD enclosure to another (assuming drive order is maintained), will OS X still recognize it? Or will the array only work in the enclosure in which it was setup?

I read somewhere that SoftRAID supports this. Just wondering if Disk Utility does too.

Thanks :)
 
I believe that this will work if the enclosure doesn't try to first format the disks. I have moved a RAID-0 2 drive array once before and it continued to work fine ( cMP <---> ThunderBay IV ).

I have heard that if your enclosure also has a hardware RAID controller, it is best to load some scratch disks into it and set the "JBOD" mode prior to installing your RAID array disks, just to be sure it doesn't try to create a new array.


Let us know if it works for you ... :eek:

I am experimenting with SoftRAID 5 currently, and it seems pretty neat so far. Kudos to SoftRAID Tech Support representative Mark for responding to my support-question emails in less than 2 minutes! Incredible!!
 
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The enclosure needs to be in JBOD mode so, as hfg says, be wary of an enclosure with hardware RAID capability.

Otherwise it doesn't matter disk order or even if the disks are in the same enclosure, DiskUtility stores metadata on the drives to help the OS sort things out..... although for performance/reliability I'd put them in the same enclosure, or two identical ones. I moved a RAID0 striped drive pair from MacPro internal drive sleds to an OWC thunderbay IV without issue.

SoftRAID is nice if you want to go RAID5 but RAID 5 and large drives don't mix well.
 
Ok thanks guys. I don't have a need to move it now... Just a future consideration. I'll just stick with Disk Utility then. :)
 
After more thought ... I have moved several SSD RAID-0 sets with Apple DU RAID around a LOT using internal sleds, PCIe cards, LaCie "Little Big Disk", Akitio Thunder Duo, ThunderBay IV, etc. with no problems. That is a big advantage for a soft RAID array that doesn't depend on specific hardware. :)



-howard
 
Will also work if you plac each of the drives into a new, separate enclosure. I've mixed and matched successfully drives from a Little Big Disk into separate USB, Thunderbolt, SCSI, and eSATA enclosure, even using one USB and one FireWire to check out both Disk Utility and SoftRAID formatters.

Evidently, when configured as RAID, the drives are encoded with identifiers to know what set they belong to, and will look for the matching drive.

For fun, mix it up with more than 2 across several different enclosures.
 
Coming late to this party, but I can promise you that if you use OSX's RAID0 or RAID1 that you can move from enclosure to enclosure as long as the enclosure doesn't require you to use its own RAID. I always use Cheap non-RAID enclosures and let OSX handle my RAID1 setups. If one fails, I can move it to another. Doesn't even matter how the RAID was initially hooked to your computer (internal, external via USB, external via eSATA, etc.).... As long as OSX can see them then they can work with them (you can even move computers entirely!).
 
Yeah you can definitely move RAID and JBOD sets from one enclosure to another.

One of the ways I keep my backups of important data secure is to encrypt and then backup to a stripe of two disks and move the drives to different places (yes I label them with #1 and #2).

If you use MacDrive in Windows, it will also recognized the RAID.
 
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