I know how RAID work and prevent data lost from disks failures. I want to know is possible way/how easy to recover data from unfunctioned remaining RAID disks due to RAID controller failure or whole system failure. Can I even simply attach one of the RAID 1 disk to the desktop system and read as simple as USB disk? I know getting data from the other RAID types won’t be that simple but is there a way without building the whole RAID system again. Thanks.
I’ve never been a big fan of RAID for this reason… but I’ve also never had enough mission critical data that I couldn’t just store hard copy backups.
That being said… let me ask you this:
Is there a better way than RAID for data preservation/redundancy?
Just for drive redundancy it’s awesome. One drive fails you just pull it out, put in a new one and let the array rebuild. I guess the upside of hardware RAID is that some even allow you to swap a disk without powering down. Either way, you have minimal downtime.
I guess a better way would be to have multiple servers. Though with features like checksums in BTRFS I guess a RAID is still better because it can protect against bitrot. And with directly connected systems in a RAID it is generally easier to ensure consistency.
Btw: With the regular Linux software mdraid, you can also swap drives without powering down. That all works fine while running. Unless your motherbard SATA controller craps out. But the mdraid itself will handle it just fine.