Thursday, January 27, 2011

RAID 0: The importance of backup and restore

Once again RAID0 strikes. Somehow both of the HDDs that were configured in RAID0 managed to maintain some kind of configuration information from the RAID. Attempted to dual boot Windows 7 and CentOS 5 for the linux course. CentOS did not see my pair of 640GB WD HDDs, instead it saw some kind of RAID config. Took quite a bit of work to discover that the drives still contained a RAID configuration, even though the controllers were set to AHCI in BIOS.

After removing the RAID configuration from both drives my Widows drive no longer booted properly.
I backed up before I started messing with it, but its going to take time to restore. Thanks again, Acronis! Another opportunity to learn and hopefully not have lost anything.

Let this be a lesson, though. RAID0 is a decent performance boost, but in my oppinion is not worth the risks in data loss. Be dilligent and back your data up, even if you do not use a RAID array.

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