Posted: 8/19/2008 7:46:48 AM EDT
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Can I move a RAID Array ( Level 1 or 0 ) from a Windows XP Professional or Vista Pro System to a Windows XP Home system? This is not for the OS this is for a media array to store music, video pictures etc on. If not can XP home be updated to XP Pro w/o losing everything on the os drive? |
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With RAID1 (mirroring) shouldn't you be able to move just one of the two drives to the new system and treat it an an extra drive? OR Transfer the data elsewhere for short-term storage then move the RAID1 to the new system and move it back to the array? I guess the big answer is "maybe, it depends". |
This would be software OS raid via firewire. I just want a mirrored array in case one drive dies. XP Home will not let you switch the disk to dynamic. I was going to do it from my laptop them connect the array to the desktop which has XP home. |
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Neither of those raid arrays are really all that great. Are you using some kind of software RAID? Just for redundancy, or are you really betting the farm and striping those two drives? Any really good RAID array has at least 3 drives for each volume visible to the system. Given that our documents and our clients' stuff are our life's blood, we run one that uses 5 SCSI drives running at 10K RPM. We can have two drives fail and its invisible to the users. The sysadmin hot swaps new drives, and the RAID controller rebuilds everything back to the original redundancy in the background. With hard disks as cheap as they are right new, there's no reason not to. My media server at home uses a 3 drive RAID setup. I lost a month's worth of photos of my kid, and vowed it would never happen again. |
This doesn't answer the question, but wouldn't now be a great time to move to hardware RAID? |
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If I am understanding this correctly you have data on one machine you wish to move to another, this data is music and you want to physicly move a raid from one to the other. No, you can not Can you upgrade home to pro without O/S loss or data loss, Hopefuly if nothing goes wrong. Back it up first, rule number one. |
Home users are much more likely than business users to play games, watch DVD's or do other CPU intensive activities where software disk mirroring will provide a marked performance hit. |
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Just To clarify I have 4 x 320GB Drives with nothing on them. I have a couple of USB drives with files on them and I am trying to consolidate to one external array. I have a 4 bay SATA tower I plan on planning on putting the drives in. I want RAID 1 so the data is protected. I need to connect the array to the XP Home CPU. I think I am just going to order this: www.drobo.com/ 
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Your data is NOT protected with just RAID 1 Even with RAID 5/10 you still need to run backups. |
Have you seen the power of Drobo? |
Pretty cool but my statement still stands. Data can become corrupt or you may need to restore a previous file from a week ago for example. You need multiple copies of your data. Even drobo won't give you that. |