SATA RAID Question

[XanRonin]

I have an old PIII Socket 370 with a PCI SATA RAID card with two 120GB SATA drives. I want to transfer the hard drives over to a Chaintech Socket A mobo with onboard raid and AMD XP-M 3000+. Will I lose all the data from my drives by switching from a pci card to a onboard raid system?

If, so...

Would i be able to move the pci card from one mobo to another without losing any data?

Or...

I am I just screwed?

 

[aj2003]

thats a very difficult question. Only thing i can suggest is to back up ur important stuff then try it. i dont think you will loose your data but i dont know if it will be readable by the different controller. GL

 

[ShoobieRat]

Probably. If you have the RAID setup on your current machine to run as a seamless single drive (from two drives) then most likely you'll hose things up. If you have the RAID set to just be parallel copies (backup) then no, you won't have any problems.

Now if you're going to be using the same PCI card from your current machine, moving the card to the new machine, you should be okay. Just install the card first and make sure it's setup, then put the drives on.

Backup your data, check the specs of the new controller card, and give it a try.

 

[sPlAtOiD]

Although wont he take a speed hit on using a pci card.

 

[XanRonin]

Sorry two 120GB SATA drives set in Raid 0.

Could you rephrase/explain the statement "Although wont he take a speed hit on using a pci card."?

 

[SanToast]

He said that because the PCI BUS is not as fast as the link between the SATA controller and South Bridge. In other words, a PCI based SATA controller is much slower than an onboard SATA controller.

You will not loose the data when swapping the HDDs from one SATA controller to another. You will have to reconfigure the HDDs because when you installed Windows, it used the PCI based controller's drivers to identify the device. You will have to replace the drivers with the one's for the onboard SATA controller (or South Bridge in most cases). If you installed the Windows based SATA controller drivers, then you will need to reinstall those as well.

Check it man.

EDIT: You will also need to reconfigure the RAID setup. You can do this by accessing the RAID Configuration Utility (F6) once the POST has completed successfuly.

 

[XanRonin]

I did not install windows on either of my two sata drives i have a 10GB EIDE drives that I use for my OS and backup files. Will that have any effect on the swapping? P.S. I plan to move the EIDE drive as well but that is child's play. Thanks for your help. I will have time to try it out next week.