RAID 0 Hard Drive Swap

[HFierro]

Hello,

I have an old PC (details below) that has two small HDDs in RAID 0 and warns of "degraded" when booting up. I would like to change them out but have the following questions:

Can I determine which HDD is bad?
If so, can I just change that one out?
If so, will a SATA 3 HDD work?
If so, does it have to be the exact same size as the other HDD?
Can I do everything without losing data / having to reload the OS since there are two HDDs?

Area-51 7500 R4 purchased in January 2007
EVGA Nforce 680i SLI MB
D-core 2 Duo Extreme 2.66 G QX6700 8M processor
PDP 1GB DDR2 Low Latency PC-6400 AW96 memory (x2)
x2 150G SATA 1.5Gbits/s HDDs RAID 0
Windows XP Pro SP3

Thanks

 

[Hawkeye22]

Some raids come with control software which can usually be a stand alone program or sometimes it add it to the control panel. Without either of these, there is no way to know which drive is bad. Your raid bios may also show which drive is degraded.

Preferably you should use an identical drive to the one you are replacing. It must at least be the same size or larger, though a larger drive will just leave behind wasted space. In this case, you will need to clone the bad drive to a new one. This is a pain since you need to use a different computer to do this since the raid is your boot drive.

Your best bet is to just use backup software to backup the drive (raid array) to an external drive or other storage drive. Replace both raid drives and restore the backup to the raid. This will allow you to purchase newer, larger hard drives of the same type.

 

[WyomingKnott]

I'm curious about something. A RAID array is usually "degraded" when one of the drives has failed and it's running without parity / mirroring. RAID0 doesn't have any redundancy; a degraded RAID0 is a dead RAID0. Can one of you clarify this for me?

 

[slhpss]

he's probably getting a SMART warning on one of the drives saying it could fail soon...

 

[Hawkeye22]

I'm curious about something. A RAID array is usually "degraded" when one of the drives has failed and it's running without parity / mirroring. RAID0 doesn't have any redundancy; a degraded RAID0 is a dead RAID0. Can one of you clarify this for me?

LoL, yes, I thought the same thing. All I could come up with is his bios or windows is reporting a SMART error. Perhaps even the raid controller is passing along SMART information. In this situation, the drive is noted as likely to fail, not failed.

If this isn't the case, then I assume the OP is using RAID 1, not RAID 0. I don't think any RAID that uses parity can use just two drives. As you know, mirroring doesn't use parity, but makes exact copies of files.

 

[HFierro]

Best answer selected by HFierro.