I know how RAID work and prevent data lost from disks failures. I want to know is possible way/how easy to recover data from unfunctioned remaining RAID disks due to RAID controller failure or whole system failure. Can I even simply attach one of the RAID 1 disk to the desktop system and read as simple as USB disk? I know getting data from the other RAID types won’t be that simple but is there a way without building the whole RAID system again. Thanks.

  • r00ty
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    2 months ago

    I’m sure I’ve seen paid software that will detect and read data from several popular hardware controllers. Maybe there’s something free that can do the same.

    For the future, I’d say that with modern copy on write filesystems, so long as you don’t mind the long rebuild on power failures, software raid is fine for most people.

    I found this, which seems to be someone trying to do something similar with a drive array built with an Intel raid controller

    https://blog.bramp.net/post/2021/09/12/recovering-a-raid-5-intel-storage-matrix-on-linux-without-the-hardware/

    Note, they are using drive images, you should be too.

    • Possibly linux
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      12 months ago

      Frankly hardware raid is dead and was never great. Software raid is significantly better.

      • r00ty
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        22 months ago

        I think it had its uses in the past, specifically if it had the memory backup to prevent full array rebuilds and cached data loss on power failure.

        Also at the height of raid controller use (I would say 90s and 2000s) there probably was some compute savings by shifting the work to a dedicated controller.

        In modern day, completely agree.