[sethhobrin]

If my operating system crashes or the system board fries and I need to do a fresh OS install on another system board will I be able to install any of these software raid programs and have it detect my drives that still have the data and restore the entire array?


Which on of these software packages works well in this area? Mainly I want to be able to recover from any kind of system rebuild without loosing the raid array as long as the physical drives are intact.

 

[Balthazar2k4]

I am currently looking into FlexRAID for my media server. My understanding is that it is not meant for OS drives. That said, if Windows crashes you will need to reinstall the OS, but your DATA should remain intact. You would only need to re-setup the RAID. If your motherboard bites the dust and it takes your drives with it then your are pretty well SOL. If your motherboard goes and leaves the DATA drives intact you would once again only need to re-setup the RAID. The key is keeping the OS drive separate from your DATA. The idea of a "snapshot" RAID like FlexRAID is that if one of your protected drives fail you are covered. Multiple drive failure needs additional RAID coverage. Also, FlexRAID is not ideal for drives where the data changes continuously which is why it is good for video and music files that you don't often make changes too.

 

[candre23]

I can't speak for unRAID, but FlexRAID is completely separate from the OS or file system. It's really just a parity-based backup. All FlexRAID does is look at whatever folders/drives you tell it to, and make parity backup files for that data. You could pull any drive out of a FlexRAID backed-up server, plug it into another machine, and everything that was on the drive would still be there. You could even pull out all the drives (including the parity drive), plug them into another machine, install FlexRAID, and repair any damaged data.


It is my understanding that unRAID works at the file level, so that even if you couldn't rebuild a damaged array on another machine (maybe you can, I don't know), you could at least pull the undamaged data off each drive individually. Since unRAID uses one of the Linux file systems, you would need to install special software to read it on a Windows machine, but it can be done.


This is one of the major selling points of pseudo-RAID vs. hardware RAID in my opinion. The safety of your data is not reliant on the integrity of the array.