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[Help] Moving Hardware RAID drives between x3650 servers (lemm.ee)

submitted 6 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Hi all,

I have two servers - one is an IBM System x3650 M3 that I’ve been using for a while and the other is an x3550 M5 that I would like to move everything to. I have 6 drives which I think were configured as RAID 1 on hardware level. (MegaRAID, I think)

Is there a way that I can “just move” the drives from the old to the new - and just let it boot and continue where it left off - without making a mess of things or would that just screw up the RAID configuration?

I’ve been searching for answers, even asking ChatGPT (lol) for some answers but can’t seem to find any concrete answers.. All the data is backed up but I’m worried that I’ll spend days (trying to remember how to) reconfigure everything if something goes wrong.

Anyone has experience with anything like this?

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 months ago

Do you have spare drives to test? Can be really small or mismatched, it's just for testing.

The idea is as follows: make the exact same RAID with the old controller on test drives, then put them in the target controller with hopefully the same settings and see if it's happy. Make sure to have some large files with known checksums on it, just to test if the data is correct and not corrupted in subtle ways.

If it works, then it should work with the real drives. If it doesn't, good luck.

Also RAID 1 with 6 drives doesn't really make sense. RAID 1 would be mirrors, and if your data had 6 copies I think you'd care way too much about your data to even consider doing this. Probably RAID 5/6/10, which adds parity and striping to the mix which does significantly increase the chances of incompatibility.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago

RAID 5 or 6 maybe with 6 drives?

First before doing anything, do you have reliable tested backups in place for the data on the drives?

Hardware RAID is pretty difficult to work with, if the RAID controllers are the same model with the same firmware moving the drives should in theory work.