Question : SATA Drives within HP 6-Port SATA RAID Controller

Hi All,

I have a situation where we have a load of static data (essentially reference material that doesn't change or only infrequently) stored on 3 SATA drives that are inside an HP 6-Port SATA RAID Controller on an old ML110 server.

The array is configured to show as 3 separate drives (each is 250GB).

The RAID options are turned OFF, since we have backups and if the data wasn't available for a few days it wouldn't cause any major issues (and worst case, most, if not all of it, could be downloaded from various places on the net).

Two of the drives are effectively mirrors of each other (a RoboCopy job runs overnight to copy any additions, or changes from one disk (D) to another (E) - but again, this is not a RAID Mirror.

The other disk is a bit of a dumping ground, that anyone can use as temp storage.

My question is:

We are wanting to consolidate servers, and we have a spare machine with room for individual SATA disks so I am looking at moving them over.  I'd prefer to physically move them as 250GB will take a bit of time and network resource to move (not a major, but hey!)

If I were to remove one of the disks and put it in a "normal PC" as a secondary drive, would it be readable by that machine, or would it be unreadable in the same way that a single disk from a RAID5 array would be unreadable?

I know I could just try it, but if the second machine can't read it, might it 'trash' the setup on the disk from the array's perspective?

Thanks,

Alan.

Answer : SATA Drives within HP 6-Port SATA RAID Controller

If they really are SATA (many servers use SAS drives instead of SATA), then yes, just read them in another PC. As they aren't setup as a RAID array you should have no issues reading them, and it should trash them either.