I have a 2-bay RAID enclosure with one 8-TB drive. Can I remove the drive and put a different one and copy files to it? If I then remove the old one and put the old one back, will the data which was on it remain intact?
Hi,
If you currently have a hardware RAID solution of some sort, but only have one single physical drive configured as part of it, then you don't really have a functioning RAID configuration at the moment. Even the most basic levels of RAID, RAID 0 (striping the contents of one logical drive across multiple physical drives) and RAID 1 (the mirroring of one physical drive's contents exactly onto another, to provide a single failure-redundant logical drive) require more than one drive in order to be created in the first place.
So I'm guessing that you've either yet to actually set RAID up, or you have one half of a broken mirrored pair left in the enclosure. In the case that you've not yet configured RAID, then you can do whatever you'd like here, really. Removing and replacing the drive with another will have no effect, since there is no RAID logical volume in existence at the moment. You could replace the drive, then when you had more than one drive in place, look at setting up RAID 0 or RAID 1.
If, however, this is one half of a broken RAID 1 pair, then you will of course get data loss when you pull the remaining drive out. The new drive you put back in its place will have none of the data from the original RAID 1 mirrored pair, and will need to be set up cleanly (along with a second drive) as a new RAID 1 logical volume. Once that was done, you would then be able to copy data on to the new RAID 1 volume, and use it normally.
Lastly, if you take out a drive and then put that same drive back in, this shouldn't cause data loss, no. Again, either you have no RAID at the moment, and so it's just a single stand-alone disk; or you have one half of a degraded RAID 1 mirror, and pulling the drive out and putting it back in will just make that RAID 1 volume available again, albeit still in its degraded state.
Hope this helps. If I've mis-understood something about your setup or if you have any follow-up questions, please let us know and either myself or someone else will be able to help you further, most likely.
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You have understood. Had only one drive and another drive for backup. Have set up to Raid 0 with just one drive as I am not likely to invest in multiple drives right now. However in future I plan to have a Raid 6 setup with five drives.
Hi,
OK, thanks for clarifying. In that case, the scenario is more or less the same as what I'd mentioned previously for RAID 1: you can remove the drive, but any new drive you install would have to be set up as a new RAID volume, since it would contain none of the RAID configuration or data of the drive you'd removed. The old drive would still contain whatever files were on it at the time of its removal, and these would be available again in the future if you swapped the two drives out once more.
I'd also point out that generally it's very difficult and/or entirely unsupported to grow a RAID 0 volume onto new drives, so if you're going to want a two-drive RAID 0 setup, you're best waiting until you actually have both disks in the enclosure. Otherwise when you add the second disk in the future, it's very likely you'll end up needing to destroy and re-create the RAID 0 logical volume anyway.
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