Moving Raid Array on to another D20

Ok I currenty have a few D20 systems and one unit that I had for a spare as a backup is going to be used. I wanted to migrate a set of 4 x 15K 300G drives in a raid 5 array to the system. How would I do that on the system without having to reinstall the OS. Do I just go to the Raid setup and do that or is there a special procedure to do it. Any info would be appriciated
Mike

D20 is going back a while, but I "think" you should be able to simply move the drives over to the new system and be good to go. You might want to spot check the BIOS settings on each system to make sure anything specific to the onboard Marvell controller is set up the same on both the original and new system, but nothing jumps out at me as being tricky here. I believe the metadata on the drives will ensure everything works correctly.
The only recommendation I might make would be to ensure each drive from the original system gets plugged into the same respective port on the new system. I really don't think this will make any difference since all the array info should be in the metadata....just a safety precaution.

Similar Messages

Moving RAID Array from old to new workstation

I've completed building a new rig. Win10 is working. I have a RAID 0 array of 2-750GB drives in the old rig. I've installed 2-1TB drives in the new rig. Drive manager shows both old and new HD's but not as a single RAID array (RAID-OLD,
and RAID-NEW, as I have named them during the BiOS RAID naming. Could I have some guidance about this? I also have the contents backed up on a USB-3 external drive, but would like to continue with both of the RAID arrays and not go through transferring
data via USB.

Hi CWO4 Mann
For hardware, we need the driver to drive it works in Windows system. When you move your RAID to new system, ensure you have installed appropriate driver.
I suggest you download the driver in Windows 10 Technical Preview, install it in Windows 8 compatibility mode to check if it works well.
Alex Zhao
TechNet Community Support

Is It Possible to Clone RAID Array in a Safe and Easy Way?

Why do computer users need to clone RAID array, especially Windows Server users need to do RAID cloning? Generally speaking, they need to clone RAID array regularly in order to upgrade disk or migrate data from small disk to a larger one. A typical
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What a time-consuming task!
Is it possible to clone RAID array in a safe and easy way? The answer is yes and this article will introduce a RAID cloning software.

Hi jiangchunli,
Were you looking to post this question in some other forum? This looks like related to RAID and Disk upgrades.
This forum is meant for
http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/services/recovery-manager/
Please let us know if this is indeed Hyper-V Recovery Manager related so we can help better.
Thanks
Praveen
Praveen/ www.PraveenKumar.in

Raid array being seen as 2 individual drives

Hi. Here is the issue as posted in other places. Still searching for the answer to this one.
Specs:
K7n2 delta2 platinum with b50 bios
2x1gb crucial pc3200 2.5cas ram
AMD Barton 2500
2 x 160gb 7200rpm 8mb cache SATA Samsung Hdd's
Thermaltake 430w psu
Gainward fx5700 ultra graphics
OS's: original xp corp, slipstreamed xp corp sp2
raid drivers: nvraid.sys v4.27, 5.10, 5.11 (also the needed nvatabus.sys with those)
I am NOT overclocked.
fsb 166
1:1 ram/cpu
no spread spectrum or other garbage
ddr400 patch disabled
PSU gives presumably stable reading (according to what I see), with amperage ratings above the required.
checked and rechecked cables for bad ones
ran mulitple scans on drives, all come up drives OK
I HAVE installed into Raid 0 already, this is not an issue of hardware failure as far as I am concerned.
So here is the scenario
I have properly set up the array, using correct bios settings and the raid setup utility, for a raid 0 array of those 2 hdd's listed. When booting into xp, either version, I have used all 3 of the driver sets listed. I have been reinstalling to do some performance tests on different configurations.
Anyway, for the last few nights I have been trying to get the windows setup to see the raid 0 array as one 300gb drive. It does not, no matter what I try. It sees them as 2 drives, each being 160gb (or thereabouts). These drives are matched, same firmware, same lot, so that should not be an issue.
I have used numberous tools to delete the mbr on the drives, both in an array and as single drives. I have done the same as well as tried an install and formatted each drive individually, still the same effect when the raid array is recreated.
Basically, I can find no good reason why the array is seen as individuals and not as an array. It is interesting to note, that even though xp setup sees the the array as 2 drives, I can complete the text based portion of setup. However, rebooting to start the GUI portion of setup, it will not boot. Obviously becuase the bios has the controller as the nvraid controller and it is supposed to be a raid 0 array, so I expected that.
Short of rewriting the mbr, either by deleting it or by changing each drive by formatting/partitioning/installing an OS on them, I cannot think of how to fix this. I know the drives and xp cd's work because I have already installed with them.
I understand what to do in the bios portion, and in the raid setup utility portion. I know that I can boot into windows as a single drive and use the nvraid tool to set it up, but that is not the way it should be, and that is not the way I am going to learn WHY this is happening.
Roger that. First set in bios enable raid (in this bios I have to enable IDE array, then choose which controller to actually enable raid on, which happens to have been SATA 1 & 2).
Second, upon reboot, I use the F10 key to enter raid utility. Then, set to striping, set stripe size (which was one of the things I am testing), and add the drives to the array. Next step is to create it. It asks to clear disc data, and it is done.
Have deleted that array as well as just cleared it. Have deleted it and reboot and rebuild it. Have deleted it, reboot, change bios back to non-raid, reboot. Reboot. Change bios back to raid enabled. Reboot. Rebuild array in raid utility, reboot. Run setup, only see 2 hdd's, not one array.
Umm, yep, that is about it.
More to the story now.
From some other posts I tried this.
1. destroy array. reboot. disable raid in bios. reboot. verify sata's visible as singles in bios.
2. power down. pull plugs on sata's. reboot. no drives visible.
3. pull power. jumper clear cmos. wait 60 seconds. re-pin jumper. power up.
4. verify no drives. verify default bios settings. all is good
5. plug drives in. reboot. seen as singles. erase mbr on both drives. reboot
6. enable raid in bios, and choose sata 1 & 2 as "enabled". reboot.
7. use F10 key to setup raid. Here is the interesting part. Even though I deleted the array prior to all of this, and removed the drives to force an ESCD update, and cleard the cmos with the board jumper, and then before raid was enabled, cleared the mbr on the drives, when I started the raid utility, the array was already set up. That is the problem, whatever that is. I have read snippets where it is claimed that this chip or bios or whatever stores some kind of a table on this stuff, but this is a bit out of hand.
That combination, IMO, should have cleared anything out. But, the saga continues.
Thanks for you help BWM
[Edit] BTW, I have finally found a utility that will see a raid array and allow me to clear the arrays mbr. It is called SuperFdisk and is at ptdd.com. So far the only one that see's the 2 drives as 1.
Yeppers.
Started with v5.10 which came on a floppy with the mobo. Told setup to use both, nvatabus.sys and nvraid.sys. Even switched which one of the 2 I picked first, just to see.
Same thing with v4.27 and v5.11. Also tried it with just the nvraid.sys and just the nvatabus.sys (which obviously does squat for raid, lol)
Trying some new things now. Post in a little bit.
I am officially at 'Wit's End'.
Here is what I have tried now.
1.pull drive cables. pull power. jumper clear cmos. wait. power up. no drives
2.plug sata 1 in. boot. drive detected.
3.boot to command.com, run MHDD, which is a nice russian utility similar to Spinrite. Used this to clear the mbr at hardware level, and do a complete erase.
4. reboot to command.com. run superfdisk. erase mbr.
5. pull plug on sata 1, and plug in sata 2 with sata 1 cable. repeat the erasure steps listed above.
6. pull plug on sata 2, no sata plugged in. reboot
7. change bios to raid enable on sata 1 & 2. power down
8. plug in sata 1 & 2. power up.
9. inspect raid utility. no listing of any arrays. reboot
10. in raid utility, build array. did NOT clear discs. reboot
11. attempt install. single drives found again (used both drivers).reboot
12. in raid utility, optioned to CLEAR discs (funny, rebuild option is never valid).reboot
13. attempt install, both drivers, still seen as 2 individuals.
Things to note. When creating an array when presumably there are none, it assigns the raid array an ID of 2. Upon reboot, the ID is now 1. Don't know what difference that makes.
Also, tried the install listed above with APIC functionality both off and on. Also, when on, set MPS to both 1.1 and 1.4. In addition to this, each variant I tried manual HAL layers of, in this order, ACPI (the one that actually spells ACPI out), ACPI Uniprocessor, MPS Uniprocessor, and let it choose it for me.
So, here I sit in a barca-lounger at 'Wit's End', with a warm cup of java and a dinner mint.

Here is the final product on the floppy disk that I used to successfully install a stable raid 0 on the MSI K7N2 Delta 2 Ultra 400 Platinum ms-6570e motherboard.
On root of floppy, from driverset 6.70. (after much testing, I used driver pack 5.10 for my nic and smbus. I used the realtek sound drivers off the cd for audio. I have used every driver pack I could find, and while some did offer better I/O or read/write latency, this set in general provided the most stable environment. The only drivers I used were these floppy drivers for SATA, the nic and smbus just mentioned, the sound just mentioned, and updating the nvide drivers to mside drivers)
<from sataraid directory>
disk1
idecoi.dll
nvatabus.sys
nvraid.cat
nvraid.inf
nvraid.sys
nvraidco.dll
<from legacy directory>
nvata.cat
nvatabus.inf
I used the txtsetup.oem from the sataraid directory, but edited this:
[Files.scsi.RAIDCLASS]
driver = d1,nvraid.sys,RAIDCLASS
inf = d1,nvraid.inf
dll = d1,nvraidco.dll
catalog = d1,nvraid.cat
[Files.scsi.BUSDRV]
driver = d1,nvatabus.sys,BUSDRV
inf = d1, nvraid.inf
dll = d1,idecoi.dll
catalog = d1, nvraid.cat
To this:
[Files.scsi.RAIDCLASS]
driver = d1,nvraid.sys,RAIDCLASS
inf = d1,nvraid.inf
dll = d1,nvraidco.dll
catalog = d1,nvata.cat
[Files.scsi.BUSDRV]
driver = d1,nvatabus.sys,BUSDRV
inf = d1, nvatabus.inf
dll = d1,idecoi.dll
catalog = d1, nvata.cat
Now, it is important to note that I installed or attempted to install at least 50 times. Bare minimum. I noticed when I use this custom driver disc that in the GUI portion of setup, XP asks me for files from the disc. I tried lot's of different things to alleviate this, and denied some of them.
One thing that really bugged me was that the bios would see my #2 optical, slave on secondary IDE channel. A dvd/rw drive. And I could even start the setup from it. But, once I got about 3/4 through copy file stage on text setup portion, I would hang. Becuase the drive was no longer accessible. Booting from the master would get me to the desktop, but the slave optical was nowhere to be found. Updating the ATA/IDE controller to the ms ide drivers would get it visible, but I kept having issues with stability after I did that.
The most stable method I found was to use my above listing of driver files for the floppy, and when in GUI mode setup asks about NVCOI.DLL, I skipped it, ignored it, and did not let setup install it. That actually got me to the desktop, with access to the slave optical as a "removable drive". It even knew what the hardware was. It just could not access it. On a reboot however, back to not seeing it. This method however did allow me to update the nvide driver with the mside driver with no stability issues. So, for me it was a raving success.
Here are some links regarding the SATA RAID driver workaround:
http://66.102.7.104/search?q=cache:jHbX5bNfGx4J:www.msfn.org/board/lofiversion/index.php/t51140.html+nforce2+nvraid.sys+ms+ide&hl=en&client=opera
http://www.aoaforums.com/frontpage/index.php?option=content&task=view&id=292&Itemid
http://66.102.7.104/search?q=cache:J9UhG2Kd8W4J:www.short-media.com/forum/showthread.php%3Ft%3D32751+xp+2+sata+raid+0+seen+as+individual&hl=en&client=opera
Early on one problem I noticed was that in text setup mode of xp installation, there were long pauses that I have never seen before. I noticed that with both ide and sata installs. Also I noticed that when booting there was a really long pause when the xp logo is first seen in a sort of dim state till when it became bright and vivid.
Come to find out that this is a more or less typical scenario. Most instances that I read about were all pointing to the nvide driver. So, I found if I just updated the PATA controller to the standard ms ide driver, that went away and the whole system ran better.
It took awhile to figure out that if you install a driver with the nForce2 chip, you had to uninstall it or you will have issues. Herein was the main problem I encountered with the SATA RAID installs. The nvatabus.sys driver was required for an SATA RAID install. Omitting the ata driver was impossible. And for awhile I had no success updating the ms ide driver once I was to the desktop without major instability. Here are some links regarding the drivers for this chipset:
http://www.nforcershq.com/forum/latest-drivers-for-nforce-3-vt60240.html
In my browsing I came across some pretty interesting articles regarding ACPI. One thing I started playing with was the different HAL layers that xp installs on it's own, vs. me picking one manually (F5 key). I must have started the setup at least 50 times to figure out this: that this particular board does not give me the bios settings to install xp with anything but the ACPI Uniprocessor Hal. For instance, the MPS Uniprocessor HAL is much more responsive, but it lacks the IRQ's needed for setup to see the raid array. I booted to each one, some locking the system up, some booting OK. The one I found the best performance with early on was the one that spells out ACPI, not just initialized. (sorry, I don't want to look it up).
I seemed to be getting closer, but I could not find the needed bios settings to properly manage my ACPI, and since I was trying for RAID, I could not use the one that did work. Here is a link for that kind of stuff.
http://www.fceduc.umu.se/~jesruv98/info/acpi/acpi.html
Another thing that I did not like was being forced to use the dynamic overclocking feature of this board. I have a 333mhz barton core, and I have ddr400 ram. In optimized (fool proof) mode in bios, I was running asynchronous. I did not want that. So I set it down to run at 166mhz, with very slow and conservative settings on everything. Unfortunately, if I did this "manual" method, I was forced to use the dynamic overclocking. I thought I had that figured out. So I set everything to "optimized". But, as it turns out, the system had terrible stability without the dynamic overclocking set to at least Private. What this meant is that I could not rule out that my stability issues (corruptions and hangs and bsod) were from being overclocked even a tiny bit or not. And as if that were not enough, this bios has a special set of settings you must unlock to see. And one of those is paramount in achieving a stable system. It is called the DDR400 patch, and it is enabled by default. So, by pressing SHIFT+f2 AND CTRL+F3, these settings are now available. Like I said, I had to disable that DDR400 patch setting.
I also found out from the first day that my board shipped with the latest bios. I flashed the 2 prior versions with no success in more stability. After about 6 weeks of getting whipped on by this board, I found mention of some modded bios's for this board. I have used modded bios's in the past, some worked wonders, others required some serious effort to recover from. What I found out about this board is that there are 2 players who make the modded bios's. Here is the first index I found from a german website. This one actually is for the older B4 version only for the Platinum.
http://storage-raid-forum.de/viewtopic.php?t=2824
And here is an english forum for pretty much the same thing
http://www.nforcershq.com/forum/bios-mods-for-k7n-and-k8-boards-vt55014.html
These links have a bit more information, and I decided to go with these. I tried versions b61,b62 and b71. I found b71 to work the best for me. Mind you I am not into overclocking or what-have-you. Just a rig that performs as well as it was advertised to do. Try these out for the bios information:
http://forums.pcper.com/showthread.php?t=385480
https://forum-en.msi.com/index.php?topic=84715.0B62
Here is a page that had a bunch of misc stuff I found interesting:
http://66.102.7.104/search?q=cache:QkvLeKcbwjQJ:www.amdzone.com/modules.php%3Fop%3Dmodload%26name%3DPNphpBB2%26file%3Dviewtopic%26p%3D75383+nforce2+ultra+nvraid+driver+freeze&hl=en&client=opera
In the end, I have, I think, conquered this board. My findings can be summed up as follows, all in my opion only I guess.
1. There are some ACPI/APIC issues with this board or this chipset. I believe it also included drivers and some can be attributed to XP.
2. There are some major bios issues with this board.
3. There are some major driver issues concerning SATA/RAID. I am not sure who get's the boob prize, nVidia or MSI.
The only way I have found to get RAID 0 installed and stable is to modify my bios (which is a modded beta version), modify my driver disk for SATA/RAID, modify my install sequence for those drivers, modify my drivers within windows after setup, use different drivers from different driver packs for different pieces of hardware, and modify my HAL layer after everything else is done, to achieve peak performance.
If I had not spent soooo much time trying to get a stable install, I would have built up an Unattended CD, which has some possibilities for forcing non WHQL drivers. But, hey man, I am totally burn out on this board. And all it was for is a spare LAN box for when I go to a lanparty. Sheesh. Murphy's law.
Oh, and I also found out, with my own eyes, that the Soyo KT600 Dragon+ that I dumped for this wonderful board, is way faster. Faster read/writes, faster throughput on the nic, faster booting, much faster installs of xp. As a matter of fact, I could get my KT600 to get a consistent thruput on the network to my older KT266a board at 99%. That is pretty fast. 2 of these Platinum boards, on a sweet switch that is tweaked, will only go up to 91%, no matter how much I tweak them. The gigabit connects via a crossover cable at about 38% of full bore. This is tweaked stuff, but still. I listened to the hype. Dual channel memory, giglan, etc etc.
I hope this may help anyone else out there who is still fighting with these issues.
Out.
sul

Raid array removed, hard drives now wont work?? help

Hi all,
I had a KT266 pro2RU motherobard with 2 ibm 40gig hard drives that were in raid mode 0,
I took the 2 drives out of the computer and wanted to use one of them in another computer on a standard drive controller (single drive not raid) and i cant seem to access the disk to format it or install windows xp on it?, it keeps saying write access denied?,
I am thinking that i should have unmounted? the raid array before taking the drives out to put them back to normal but dont have the raid system any more, is there any way i can make these 2 40 gig drives work now?, or has it overwritten the HD bios or something?
If anyone can help i'd appreciate it
Cheers

i would try fdisk on it or partition magic if you have that
http://www.bootdisk.com will get you an me boot disk has f disk

Is moving all active ports to another VSAN disruptive?..

Hi! I moved all active ports to another VSAN and this caused a server to failure. I know that this can be because of the small time-out values at the operating system or bad multipathing, but how large a time-out can be in a such reconfiguration?.. What if the server can't survive any storage loss and we move server and storage array ports to another VSAN? I wonder if it can be done without any traffic interruption...

Hi Artem,
Changing server from VSAN is a disruptive process for each path you're acting on: that means if you're not having dual fabrics and proper multipathing configuration, the server will lose access to its LUN for a certain amount of time. Depending on the operating system you might expect various behaviors (kernel panic, SCSI errors, CPU in I/O wait until timeouts,...). Consider it even more restrictive when booting on SAN or when swap memory is also on a SAN LUN.
It's always good practice to work one one fabric at a time by disabling the path attached to it from the OS perspective (if multipath software is not set in a failover mode).
Changing VSAN membership for a FC port on the MDS9000 means that the initiator HBA has to log (FLOGI) into a new VSAN where the DomainID is different from previous VSAN, so its FCID will change also. It is same effect as moving fibers to another physical SAN from the host perspective.

K8N DIAMOND: New Raid array and old HD... I'm going crazy!!! Please

Hi guys
First, sorry for my poor english...
My problem is:
I bought two Raptor 36 Gb for my new raid array.
I have my old HD Hitachi 250 Gb connected on sata 1.
I connected my two raptor, on sata 3 and 4, I enabled all sata port and raid config for ports 3 and 4.
I restart PC, typed F10 and set a stripe array with two raptor. All run ok...
Restarted and boot with my copy of WinXP with SP2 and NF4 raid drivers.
Installation found my array and my Hitachi;
Hitachi with 4 partitions; C (os), D (driver), E (films), F (music)
I create one partitions on my raid array, and it takes I: letter... So I formatted and start to copy os...
Errors occurs when, restarting pc and resetting the boot to Hard disk (the order of booting is 1 - nvidia array, 2 - hitachi 250 gb), just before loading installation, It shows a black screen with an error: "there is an error in your hard disk bla bla bla.. try to control your connection or connect to windows help....bla bla..."
The Raid array works properly, infact I try to disconnect my Hitachi from sata port 1 and all installation works (I'm writing from Win xp on the raid array).
I tried to connect the hitachi on port 1 of silicon image controller.... same error..!!
I'm desperate... I have all my life on my hitachi...
I think that there's a sort of conflict in drive letter assignement... I cant find a solution ..
PLEASE HELP ME!!!

Glad it worked, I had a feeling it would.
Quote
One question for you.. on G: partition, there's a directory called "Windows", do you suggest me to format this partition??
You can format it if you want to free up space, but unless you moved things around the My documents folder and everything in it is on that partition, along with anything you might of had on the old desktop during that Windows install. You might have something you want there, I usually leave mine for a few month, and figure out if I have everything I need.
Quote
What I have to do, if I need to reinstall WIn XP on first partition of raptor array??
Things should be fine now as Windows marked the Hitachi drive as G. You should be able to reinstall without issue. But if you have a lot of sensitive info on the Hitachi, I would always disconnect the Hitachi if doing a fresh install. Once windows is done installing, hook it back up. But next time you shouldn't have to reconfigure NVRAID after disconnecting and reconnecting.

Can't create raid array in 10.4.6

I am trying to create a mirrored raid array with two Fantom USB 2 external harddrives using disk utility.
I am unable to drag the image of any hard drive into the right window and the create button is never activated.
I have restarted, verified the disks and so on. I hve tried to select a different external disk but that won't work either.
Any ideas what's up.

You can try updating the drivers from the makers site, but it could be that Apple won't allow USB drives to RAIDed.
Unless your recording ET or something where a hard drive failure could mean disaster, mirrors are not ideal form of backup.
Consider auto-cloning and auto-backup software like DeJaVu or Retrospect.
What this will do is give you the benefit of time, cloning will "clone" a whole boot drive and make it bootable in case you need it. (You can clone a whole non-boot drive as well.) Auto-backup will copy user type files and folders, but it's not designed to copy a OS from one drive to another.
http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/systemdiskutilities/dejavu.html

GX60 Destroyer - installing two SSDs in a RAID array.

I am sorry if this is repeated in another thread, but I am struggling to find any information that could help with me installing Windows 7 Ultimate x64 on two SSDs in a RAID array in my MSI GX60 Destroyer. Windows keeps asking for drivers and cannot detect the SSDs during windows installation.
Has anyone done this before and if so, how did you do it?
Many thanks for reading!
Regards,
Iain

You would need RAID driver from AMD which MSI does not offer it for download.

RAID Array being blown away when CamCorder inserted or removed

This is a strange problem at best.
I have six external drives on my G5 in an unequal mix of FW-400 and USB. The issue is with two of the former when combined in a RAID-0 or RAID-1 array.
Both of the disks in this array (Western Digital 320GB FW-400) are of the same make and model. There are never any issues unless and until such time as I insert or remove a Sony CamCorder: the array is blown away. Gone. It does not matter if the Camera is on or off when inserted or removed. Albeit part of the chain, the Camera is attached to another device altogether via FW.
This will happen without exception each and every time.
Anyone have any ideas what's going on here?
Thanks,
Lyman

Hi Lyman;
This doesn't sound like the best designed implementation of RAID. Generally it is recommended that everything try to be kept as same as possible for the various part of the RAID array. Since the overall performance of a RAID array is determined by the slowest link which in your case would be the USB, I seriously doubt that it will have stellar performance.
What is probably happening is that the camcorder is changing the Firewire bus enough to disrupt the RAID array. I doubt that there is any way to fix this short of putting the RAID array on it's own buss using a card in one of the expansion slots. That would leave the computer's Firewire for the camcorder.
What ever you do stop using USB for RAID. USB is never going to be able to give you good enough performance to be worthwhile.
Allan

Is it possible to record data directly from PXI-5112 scope card through PXI bus to SCSI RAID array (connected to PXI-8210)?

Colleagues,
Is it possible to record data directly from PXI-5112 scope card through PXI bus to SCSI RAID array (connected to PXI-8210)?
Which will be the maximum transfer rate for continuous data recording?
Thank you,
Sergey
Sergey

Sergey,
The PXI-8210 can connect to any SCSI 2 compliant device. If the RAID controller is SCSI 2 and appears just like a hard drive in the operating system, then you can send data directly to the RAID array. The problem is that the driver for the PXI-5112 does not yet support continuous acquisition. The on-board 16MB or 32MB buffer stores the data until the entire acquisition is completed. Once the acquisition complete, all of the data is transferred from the on-board buffer to the hard drive. After that happens, the NI 5112 is ready for another acquisition.
Best Regards,
Jace Curtis
NI Applications Engineering

Can RAID array be bootable startup?

I have a striped RAID array that I have connected to my iMac by Firewire 800, an external USB drive using USB 2.0, and another external HD connected on Firewire 400. Using SuperDuper!, I've been trying without success to make bootable clones on these three HDs. Even though the cloning seems to go well, when I hold down the option key on startup, the drives don't show up. Are these configurations all capable of being bootable startups? Any suggestions on why they don't show up?

Hi William, Happy Holidays!
Supposedly they are, but I've never actually tried the FW/USB combo Raid, tried both seperately in RAID, Which, BTW, I would not recommend, the longest I've had a RAID go is 6 months before destructing themselves beyond recovery.
Also, I should point out that a single FW/800 Boot drive will be faster than a FW/800 USB combo Raid due to the slowness of USB2. I get around 69 MB/Sec with FW/800, and 29 MB/Sec with a 4 drive USB2 RAID, around 20NB with a 2 drive USB2 RAID!

Scratch disk with two RAID arrays

I have 2 500GB disks in a RAID0 array for Windows / programs and another 1T RAID1 array for data. Where should I place the scratch disk?

Should I create a dedicated partition on the RAID0 array for the scratch space?
Please do yourself a big favor and do not do any partitions. They will only slow things down, as the OS thinks it's 2 physical HDD's and will tell them (the two logical HDD's), that it needs data at the same time. Remember, it's one physical HDD (even though it's striped, it's managed as one.
Now, here are my thoughts:
1.) RAID 0's will speed things up. However if one of the two drives fails, ALL is lost. I do not recommend using a RAID 0 (any flavor of 0), for the system/program disk. If you do, be sure to have a great backup scheme and use it.
2.) Now, as of CS, PS no longer has a real limitation on how much HDD space it can use for Scratch Disks. Going back, on was limited to 4GB and had the ability to set 4 of these. Back then, having say a 32GB SCSI HDD, and doing some 4GB partitions made sense. Now, it does not.
I'd get a very fast, smaller system HDD. Then, you can use either of those RAID arrays for your media, and the other for your Scratch Disks. Having a dedicated hardware RAID controller will speed things up too.
On my system, used almost exclusively for PS, AI, InDesign, Painter and Video editing, I have 4x 1TB SATA II's for Scratch Disks, 2x 1TB SATA II's for still & video and audio. My system drive is a 500GB SATA II. Were I building now, I'd probably go with RAID 0 for the media and also a RAID 0 for my Video Exports, with non-striped 1TB SATA II's for my Scratch Disks.
Just some thoughts,
Hunt

Quick RAID array setup question

I had to upgrade one of the RAID arrays of one of my clients the other day. I had not setup the RIAD previously, but when I looked at how it was setup before it had 6 disc's in the array and one not part of the array.
Now I assume who ever set it up before assumed that the 7th disc would be the redundant disc. After looking at the way it worked and doing some calculations from what info RAID admin provided me with I came to the conclusion that the way it was set up would be 6 disc's used as the array with one being a parity drive so if a drive failed that one would take over. On top of that they had another disc that was basically useless as it was not incorporated into the raid at all.
The way I have set it up is that all 7 discs are part of the array so they have 6 disc's working with one fail over that would be the 7th meaning no disc's are wasted.
Which way is correct is my question.

I assume your predesessor left one disk as a hot spare.
Whenever a disk from a raid set fails, the raid set will be rebuild with the hot spare disk. The bad disk can be swapped and will be the hot spare from then.
Configuarions like this will give you the highest availability, but will cost you the most. Netto you will have the amount of 5 out of 7 disks. (1 for parity and 1 for hot spare).
Note that in a raid5 set the parity is spread over all raid disks. There is not such a thing as a 'paritydisk'. The term paritydisk is hust for mathmatics purposes.
Regards
Donald

Why is my new 10TB Mirrored RAID array only showing 1.8TB total space?

I have 5ea. 2TB Western Digital hard drives in a FirmTek 5PM enclosure connected via eSATA to my Mac Pro (April 2007 model). Running Leopard 10.5.8.
I used Apple Disk Utility to set up a Mirrored Raid using MacOS Extended (Journaled) and have a check mark by "Automatically Rebuild Raid Mirror Sets." My Raid Block size is 128K.
So, by all accounts I should have more than the 1.8TB showing as available space on this array.
Here is how it looks in my Disk Utillity app (link to smug pic of Disk Uility window): http://richardbrackin.smugmug.com/Other/blogpics/RAID/754262625_iffPY-S.jpg
I found a site here: http://blog.scottmroberts.com/archives/15 that discusses removing a GPT header but that doesn't sound like a good idea.
How do I get more capacity? I have clearly done something wrong.

Oh, you have mirrored one drive with 4 others creating a single 2 TB array consisting of one main member and four mirrors. I doubt this is your intended result. If you want a 10 TB RAID, then you want a "striped" not a "mirrored" RAID.
Now, you can make a striped RAID of one pair of drives, another striped RAID with another pair, then create a mirrored RAID of the two RAIDs. This would give you a 4 TB mirrored array. But the only way to use all five drives in a single array is a 5 drive striped RAID. To learn more about RAIDs see:
RAID Basics
For basic definitions and discussion of what a RAID is and the different types of RAIDs see RAIDs. Additional discussions plus advantages and disadvantages of RAIDs and different RAID arrays see:
RAID Tutorial;
RAID Array and Server: Hardware and Service Comparison>.
Hardware or Software RAID?
RAID Hardware Vs RAID Software - What is your best option?
RAID is a method of combining multiple disk drives into a single entity in order to improve the overall performance and reliability of your system. The different options for combining the disks are referred to as RAID levels. There are several different levels of RAID available depending on the needs of your system. One of the options available to you is whether you should use a Hardware RAID solution or a Software RAID solution.
RAID Hardware is always a disk controller to which you can cable up the disk drives. RAID Software is a set of kernel modules coupled together with management utilities that implement RAID in Software and require no additional hardware.
Pros and cons
Software RAID is more flexible than Hardware RAID. Software RAID is also considerably less expensive. On the other hand, a Software RAID system requires more CPU cycles and power to run well than a comparable Hardware RAID System. Also, because Software RAID operates on a partition by partition basis where a number of individual disk partitions are grouped together as opposed to Hardware RAID systems which generally group together entire disk drives, Software RAID tends be slightly more complicated to run. This is because it has more available configurations and options. An added benefit to the slightly more expensive Hardware RAID solution is that many Hardware RAID systems incorporate features that are specialized for optimizing the performance of your system.
For more detailed information on the differences between Software RAID and Hardware RAID you may want to read: Hardware RAID vs. Software RAID: Which Implementation is Best for my Application?
Actually as I squinted at your tiny image I'm sure you never actually created a RAID. You have one 2 TB drives that are not properly arrayed with any of the other four drives.
Message was edited by: Kappy

Moving Raid Array on to another D20

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