How to Transfer 2 Harddrives in RAID 1 to a new motherboard

[rocdude]

I recently added two 1 TB hard drives to an old Dell Optiplex, in RAID1. Everything is working fine. But the system is slow because of memory limitations and CPU being slow.

Is it possible to buy a new Optiplex and then move the two 1 TB hard drives to the new computer with out loosing the data [I guess I may have to clone the data to another drive, but if I clone, I will also be cloning the OS, which is currently XP, in the new systme it will be Windows 7].

Any thoughts or suggestions?

Thanks.

 

[Guest]

If you have other large drives it seems it would be easier to transfer your data to another drive and build a new RAID array using the old drives. IF you don't have 2TB worth of empty drives laying around, I'm not sure what would be the best option. How much actual data do you need to transfer?

Is the new computer using the same motherboard and IO chips for RAID?

 

[rocdude]

The amount of data is small and is only 80 GB. The drives are only 4 months old. The mother board is old, and slow.

So I am thinking of getting a new Dell Optiplex, which means new mother board and new IO chip for the RAID. I will have to remove the drive than comes with the system and replace with these two drives in RAID 1 again, for redundancy. ANy thoughts?

 

[GhislainG]

Are the old and the new system based on an Intel chipset? If so, then the answer is yes. On the other hand, each drive contains all of the info; therefore you can easily break the array and rebuild it in the new system. To play it safe, you should back it up. I presume that you already know that a RAID 1 is not a backup solution.

 

[GhislainG]

The amount of data is small and is only 80 GB. The drives are only 4 months old. The mother board is old, and slow.

So I am thinking of getting a new Dell Optiplex, which means new mother board and new IO chip for the RAID. I will have to remove the drive than comes with the system and replace with these two drives in RAID 1 again, for redundancy. ANy thoughts?

How will you keep Windows 7 if you do that? Are you sure the new system will boot XP?