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Question on Dimension E510 mirrored drives
I will be upgrading a Dimension E510 which currently has mirrored disks. When I perform an upgrade I remove the old hard drive(s) and install them in an external enclosure and keep them for a while. I do this as a safety measure in case I forgot to copy something off. I've performed upgrades before and forgot to grab a file or two only to realize it six months later after it's too late. My question has to do with the fact the current E510 internal disks are mirrored. Will I be able to install one (or both) old drives in an external USB enclosure and access the data on the disk?
My guess is "yes I will" but I'm not 100% sure if the RAID controller writes anything proprietary to the disk that would prevent me from using it for backup purposes. I've worked with storage devices in the past that would write volume serial numbers and other proprietary RAID info to each disk. This made the disk unusable to any system that was not using the exact same disk controller chip.
I plan on performing a logical backup of the system before I start. Just wanted to know if anybody had experience with the RAID controller in the Dimension E510. By the way, I realize this system is old. It's my neighbor's system and she cannot afford a new computer. Just helping her out.
shesagordie
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August 12th, 2013 13:00
Wolfgang9
Yes, as the drives were in a RAID 1 [mirror] array, you should be able to use either of the SATA hard drives, to transfer/recover the files and folders.
Bev.
jackshack
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August 12th, 2013 16:00
Please pardon the intrusion, but one qualification should be stated as a precaution. When used as part of a RAID, what is normally the boot sector is written with parametric data describing the RAID volume that the disk was once a part of. A mirrored array writes the same data to both disks, so either disk should be usable as a back-up of your old files. In order to be assured that the disk can be read, however, you should break the array before you remove the disks from the computer. This action will remove the RAID parametric data and restore the Master Boot Record to normal. The array is broken by using the CTRL i hotkey combination during the appearance of the RAID status message following a restart of the computer to reach the RAID ROM setup page. Use either the option to delete the RAID or Reset the drives to non-RAID.