Asus P4800C-E Switching RAID from Promise to Intel

[vnagubadi]

Are RAID arrays a type of standard such that, say, I can swap my two 200GB drives (they are an extended logical drive) that are in a RAID-0 array on the Intel controller of this motherboard (Asus P4800C-E) with my two 80GB drives (with a primary partition and two logical drives in one extended partition) that are in a RAID-0 array on the Promise controller? Each drive pair would still both be together, just on different controllers. Is it possible to interchange the drives with the controllers like that (the drive pairs would stay the same, they would just be on different controllers)? Or would that mess everything up because the two 200GB drives are somehow connected in a proprietary fashion to the Intel RAID controller such that moving them (in the same order and everything) to the Promise controller would render them nonfunctional?

Thanks in advance for your help.

Why do I ask? Because I am trading out my two 80GB drives (RAID-0, what WinXP is on) for two 250GB drives. And I would like to have my 250GB drives as the larger RAID-0 array on the slower Promise RAID controller and the two 200GB drives in a RAID-0 array (bootable, with WinXP on them) on the faster Intel RAID controller. [The only reason why I put the two 80s on the Promise and set those as my boot drive was because some idiot told me that the onboard Promise controller was faster, when, in fact, when I got my two 200GB drives and placed them as an extended logical drive in a RAID-0 array on the Intel controller, I found that array to be much, much more responsive).

Thanks in advance.

 

[endyen]

The short answer no.
All raids do not read drives the same. You can usually get away with using the same controller, from one mobo/system to the next. I have never heard of anyone successfully changing controllers withoutr doing a total wipe.

 

[Crashman]

With PowerQuest DriveImage 7, you can make a copy of the RAID to another drive, then copy it back to another RAID. Of course you'd have to shrink the partition to a size that fits on the backup drive, you can do that with Partition Magic (same company). I've done this, loading the RAID drivers is the same method as used for an XP instal.

And the XP instal remains OK because none of the hardware has changed, you're just using different hardware that it's already configured for (assuming you had both RAID controllers installed in XP).

Now, the reason you can't just move drives from one controller to the other is because the two different controllers do RAID differently, so the drives can't be linked together on the new controller without wiping them.

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