Hi I am about to build a file server for a small business. I am planning to fit a raid card in mirror mode with one primary drive and a secondary drive in a removable caddy (for backup). Question 1 If I installed the secondary (backup) drive on another pc would it be able to read it (as in access the data on the drive) without a raid controller Question 2 Can raid be setup to auto rebuild a backup i.e.- Primary drive permanently installed in the server Backup drive A in a caddy Backup drive B in a caddy Drive A and B will be swapped on a weekly - daily basis Question 3 If the primary drive fails and I remove it and replace it with a new blank one can the new blank drive be rebuilt by on of the backups? Notes I am considering Adaptec AAR-1430SA Adaptec AAR-1220SA But recommendations would be appreciated Thanks in advance to all
I can answer a few of your questions, someone else might want to go into more depths onto how to achieve what you want. Question 1. Depends on the raid controller, But in most cases No. Question 2. It can be done, but depending on the size of the disks, and the amount of data, it can take a while to rebuild. Question 3. Yes, I am sure you understand how mirroring works?
Intel's onboard Matrix RAID will do that (support reading in another system) and some other controllers will, but you obviously don't understand RAID. Each time you swap the drive you will need to rebuild the array, which will take hours, possibly even days during which the server might as well be considered down. What you want is a backup solution to backup from the primary drive to the secondary drive on a regular basis.
