Raid Mirroring...

[X-Ecutioner]

I've got a handful of 40gig harddrives and am planning on raid mirroring them. If I do, and I remove one of the drives while windows is running, obviously windows will say a drive has failed, but will i still have access to it? prob a dumb question...but im curious.

Also, if i remove one of the drives, can i put it in another computer and have access to the files and folders without having raid on the second computer??

Thanks

-Matt

BTW...Sorry Admins...I meant to put this in software hangout...can you guys please move this post? Thanks

Edited March 26, 2006 by X-Ecutioner

[gamehead200]

Don't worry, this is in the right forum.

You'd probably end up frying one of your drives when doing that. I believe Windows XP does not support Hot Swapping of physical drives.

[ripken204]

ya, i woudlnt do it

[nmX.Memnoch]

You'd probably end up frying one of your drives when doing that. I believe Windows XP does not support Hot Swapping of physical drives.

That's actually dependent on the controller supporting it in RAID setups. Most standard PATA controllers don't support hot swappable drives. SATA supports it in some cases, but it's rare on entry level SATA RAID controllers. Almost all SCSI RAID controllers support hot swappable drives when used with a SAF-TE capable drive enclosure (using SCA SCSI drives).

Anyway...to answer the question. If you shutdown and remove the drive you should be able to put the drive in another system and get access to the files...but only with mirrored setups. You can't do this with striped setups because part of the data is kept on one drive, and the other part on the other drive. You will also still have access to the files on the original system as well (since the purpose of mirroring is so that you can lose a drive and still have access to all of the data).

[X-Ecutioner]

Thanks guys...lol was hopin for a YES with windows native support for hot-swapping...ah well.

Thanks nonetheless