Are RAID 1 Hardrives readable when pulled out of enclosure?

[pjny]

Hello,

I am planning on getting a hardware RAID 1 enclosure such as Newertech Guardian Maximus.

I was just wondering if the format the data is stored in the drives allows the user to read the data if pulled out of the enclosure and put into a ESATA docking station such as the Thermaltake BlacX eSATA USB Docking Station.

Isn't RAID 1 just duplicated to both drives through hardware without propriety data formatting?

Thanks.

 

[Bear]

It's very likely that the hardware raid will write a special partition table to each disk containing raid information in it. What the raid controller presents to the computer is a logical disk and not a physical disk. And it's on this logical disk that the OS write its partition table. (Although it does look like a physical disk to the computers OS.)

It is therefore very likely the the computers OS could not find it's partition table if you moved the drive to a simple enclosure.

And it doesn't matter what type of raid it is.

 

[pjny]

Thanks.

It's very likely that the partition table on the disks in a hardware raid unit will have the raid information in it. What the raid controller presents to the computer is a logical disk and not a physical disk. And it's on this logical disk that the OS write its partition table.

It is therefore very likely the the computers OS could not find it's partition table if you moved the drive to a simple enclosure.

And it doesn't matter what type of raid it is.

 

[ljonesj]

depends on the device my western digital sudio 2 has raid 0 and 1 and i was able to pull off raid one the info in an external enclosure but like i said it depends on the device i think synology and drobo write something to the drive not sure thou

 

[Voblin]

I just had a good chat with a tech support guy over at Newertech. What he said in a nutshell, and in my own words, was that:

- you should be able to read the data if pulled out of the enclosure and put into a SATA docking station (as per pjny's original question)

- Bear's suggestion would be true for most RAIDs, but not for RAID 1. For Raid 1 typically there will be no "special" data written to the disk

I am planning on buying the "add your own disks" Guardian MAXimus Quad myself; if I do - I will try this out and report back

 

[Voblin]

depends on the device my western digital sudio 2 has raid 0 and 1 and i was able to pull off raid one the info in an external enclosure but like i said it depends on the device i think synology and drobo write something to the drive not sure thou

ljonesj: I was researching the WD Studio II and came across the following info from one of the users:

I have received information from a data recovery service and from WD that the encryption is unique to each enclosure.

http://community.wdc.com/t5/External-Drives-for-Mac/MyBook-Studio-data-recovery/td-p/31493/page/2

What you are saying seems to contradict the above. Please can you confirm that you actually managed to read the data from one of the WD Studio II disks in a generic SATA dock?

They also talked about the same issue here:
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/958333/
and here
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1269289/

To me, the mandatory hardware encryption with a key that is unique for each enclosure would be a show stopper - effectively it renders your data unaccessible if the enclosure itself fails. Maybe this encryption can be switched off somehow? or maybe it varies in different versions of the product?

 

[ljonesj]

ljonesj: I was researching the WD Studio II and came across the following info from one of the users:

I have received information from a data recovery service and from WD that the encryption is unique to each enclosure.

http://community.wdc.com/t5/External-Drives-for-Mac/MyBook-Studio-data-recovery/td-p/31493/page/2

What you are saying seems to contradict the above. Please can you confirm that you actually managed to read the data from one of the WD Studio II disks in a generic SATA dock?

They also talked about the same issue here:
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/958333/
and here
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1269289/

To me, the mandatory hardware encryption with a key that is unique for each enclosure would be a show stopper - effectively it renders your data unaccessible if the enclosure itself fails. Maybe this encryption can be switched off somehow? or maybe it varies in different versions of the product?

well it must have been in the raid 0 setup as i put it on an adapter that came from my old seagate drive that died and it was able to read it then but not all the info was there as it was setup in raid 0