Moving JBOD usb HD to another system

checkii

Honorable
Apr 15, 2012
5
0
10,510
Hi,

I've got a Lacie Big usb hard drive with a broken power supply. I know that the hard drives inside are working. I want to take them out and plug them into my computer but I am worried its not that simple.

This Lacie drive is a JBOD with two HD attached. Will I be able to plug them into another system and expect them to work? Or do I have to fix the JBOD somehow?
 
My guess is that the Lacie was using JBOD to create a virtual SINGLE DRIVE.

What I don't know is whether its written anything specific to each drive that would prevent them being accessed individually by another system.

If you do NOT format the drives, you shouldn't damage them by trying in a different system hooked up as SATA or in a USB case. You'll either see them show up or not.

There are TWO ways to try hooking them up to a PC:
1. one at a time (IDE/AHCI in BIOS, or simply a USB CASE),
2. BOTH with JBOD configured in the BIOS (if available) for that controller (see motherboard manual)

I'm not sure what else to recommend. Unfortunately, even if it's under warranty it sounds like you'd lose your data.

This is not my area of expertise, though I'm confident you won't change your drives by simply hooking them up, though you WILL if you format them or modify them in the BIOS to be in RAID.

My biggest worry is that setting them up as JBOD writes data to the drives that makes them unaccessible individually or even in a different system as JBOD.
 

checkii

Honorable
Apr 15, 2012
5
0
10,510
The thing is out of warranty. It is an IDE hard drive. Its so old I had to dig out an old computer just to attach the IDE drives to test them.

When I connected the hard drives they showed up but Windows did not recognize the partition and mounted them as RAW drives waiting for format.

I wasn't aware it was going to be such a hassle for Lacie to use a spanned drive for external storage.