Moving a raid array to new computer

[StevenHickerson]

Hey everyone,
I have a question about raid arrays and moving them to a new computer. How difficult is it? I'm about to redo my hard drive configuration in my current system to have a raid 5 setup on my storage disks so that there is less risk of me lossing anything important, but I plan sometime in the next few months to build a new system.

So my concern is transfering this array to the new computer. I'm going to have my OS drive on a seperate either R0 or single drive non raided, the R5 array is going to be storage only. Will I be able to recreate the r5 array when I build the new computer without loosing the data on it, or will I have to backup all the data in order to rebuild the array and then copy the data over?

This is where the problem comes in because the array I'm building is going to be 4 2tb drives, so 6tbs of space, and I have at least 3 TBs of data right now that will be on them, so backing it up is a huge pain, it took me using every spare hdd I had just to get all the data backed up now in order to wipe the drives and build the array to begin with lol.

Thanks for any answers!

[chris128]

How is the RAID array created? Is it done via software or do you have a hardware RAID controller? If its a physical RAID controller then I think you should in theory be able to just be able to move that and the hard drives into the new PC and it will not know anything has changed so will continue to work as normal.

Will I be able to recreate the r5 array when I build the new computer without loosing the data on it

You cant recreate an array without loosing everything on it

[StevenHickerson]

It's a Raid controller on the motherboard. So I guess I'll have to back everything up when the time comes so that I can rebuild the array on the new computer

Although I might have to redo something already, I setup the array last night on this computer and have been moving data back to it and the speeds I'm getting are horrible.

I know write speeds on R5 are not as fast as R0, but every benchmark I saw showed that it was still faster than single drives. With the 4 2TB drives copying information back over from multiple USB drives, the array is limiting how fast I can write and is actually slowing down the rest of my system. It's writing slower than a single HDD does usually... I know it's not the USB limiting it because it's coming from multiple different USB drives, only one copy at a time from each and I'm only getting like 5mb/s on each copy for a total of 20mb/s....

My CPU usage is only at 5% and Memory at 30% so I don't think either of those are bottlenecking it... I'll have to benchmark the array after it gets finished copying stuff. But if it's really this slow I'll have to think of something else to do.