Ghosting (Imaging) a RAID 0 Set Up?

P

Pawlu

Geek Trainee
Hello everybody,

I'm new to this forum and this is my first post ! :good:

Good my question is this, I have a RAID 0 set up with two 80 GB SATA hard disk drives. I would like to be able to create an image of my computers data for back up. I have multiple partititions on my raid 0 volume however not all partitions are important. I only want to back up two parititions mainly the boot partition and onother one containing sensitive data. Can anybody guide me as how I can do this successfully? Is their imaging software that will allow a partition to be fully imaged from a RAID 0 volume without corruption. I have Norton Ghost 2003 however I don't think it supports RAID 0 imaging.

THe problem with RAID 0 is the way it works, since it reads and writes data to two drives simultaniously, if 1 drive fails you loose all your data including anything in the separate paritions. Since data is written to two drives the operating system looks at your two drives as 1 large hard drive. In that sense so will your imaging software. If you successfully create an image of a partition, can that image be restored to a non RAID partition of equal size?


I found little information on the internet regarding the matter. I want to back up my system as quickly as possible.

Thanks for your time and help
 
Hey welcome Pawlu!

As RAID 0 combines two HD's as one. To windows and other software, it looks like a one HD. so you should be able to backup your data to one hard drive without losing any files!

You should be able to restore the files to a single hard drive or back to RAID 0...
 
Thanks Sniper,

However I'm still a little bit confused, are you absolutley sure the imaging of a RAID 0 set up is as transparent as you are saying?

I will try it out next week. If say for example my RAID PC has a major hard disk failure which in my case will mean that I loose all access to data on other partitions. I then replace the failed hard drive, re-create the RAID 0 volume, install the OS, create 2 like sized partitions, and re copy the saved images to the partitions. Should that work?

Thanks for your help.
 
Actually, unless you're seriously attached to RAID 0, I'd dump it all together. First of all, if either drive goes, you only have half the data...as in half the bits and bytes.

And yes, what Sniper is suggesting will work, as RAID 0 takes (# of drives in array) x (size of smallest drive in array), and makes it appear as one huge array. This is why, at least theoretically, half the data is written to each disk. Bit 1 goes to Disk A, Bit 2 to Disk B, Bit 3 to Disk A, Bit 4 to Disk B, and so on. Both disks are accessed for Read and Write, which theoretically might double the speeds. However, from my RAID 0 experience, I could not tell a difference between a RAID 0 setup and a non-RAID configuration.

To me, RAID 0 is more of a hype thing in regards to most controllers around today. And then you put your data at risk...no thanks. I still look for lots of storage controller options, but more for the ability to support multiple drives.
 
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