Hey guys. Can't remember if I have asked this but couldn't find a post about it.
I have a server that I am replacing. It is just a old Amd apu system with 5 drives of various items. I would like to put the drives into the new server that has a raid array but unsure if I can do this without loosing the data on the drives?.
Is it standard RAID? (not ZFS or something like that) Because no, you will have to format all the disks, including those already in the array.
Yeah it's just a standard raid. The server I brought is a x3650 m1 so don't think it is anything fancy.
Was hoping I could jam them in as a jbod and not format them.
If it's JBOD then maybe, I'm not sure. If you can backup one of the disks then you can add that disk and see what happens, if it works you can add the rest.
It depends.
Usually, RAID metadata is stored on disks themselves, which means that you may change RAID controller or even switch to software RAID (mdadm) and everything will be OK.
In some cases, metadata is stored on disks and in controller's NVRAM, then you may get "configuration mismatch", "orphaned RAID disks found", "foreign disks found" or something like that - in this case you may need to force controller to read metadata from disks and restore it into NVRAM.
I also think there were some very old and weird controllers which have stored metadata only in NVRAM - if you have one of those, you're out of luck.
In any case, you may just try and see if your new controller will see or autodetect the RAID, if the system will see the partition table, etc. Until you tell system to write data on disks, you won't lose data anyway.
Edit: I think I misread. You have a bunch of disks which aren't in the RAID, and you want to add them to existing RAID without losing data on them? Won't happen. You can add them as separate disks (if controller allows), copy data from them to existing RAID, and then add them to RAID (if disk size and amount allows for it, as well as controller).
The issue I have as well is I have 0 idea of what I'm doing lol. Might be easier to buy new disks.
You'll have to rebuild the array. You can put the old disks into the new server after backing up your data but the new controller won't see them as an array and just as disks. You'll need to create an array, initialize it, and then the new array will be available.
Cheers. Looks like the new drives are the only option I have as I don't have anywhere else to store the 4tb of data.
It would be cheaper to invest in a 5tb hdd to backup to. Then you would at least ha e a drive to do backups to after the migration as well.
True.
Didn't think of that. End goal is to set up a san/Nas of some sort as well