I had an external enclosure that had 2 drives in it set up in RAID 0 with the dip switches on the enclosure itself as it has an inbuilt RAID controller. The enclosure has failed and the manufacturer has sent me a replacement enclosure.

Is it as easy as swapping the drive from one to the other and having the dip switches and RAID mode in the same place, or will I love the (8TB worth of ) data?

 

I don't have an answer to your question, but could you educate me on the benefit of raid 0 setup for audio?

Seems like a single ssd has better performance and reliability than raid 0 with hdd. Raid 1-10 at least provide failover.

 

It is a RAID 0 set up with 2 4TB SSDs in a single enclosure (which I now regret!). The benefit is that the OS sees it as a single 8TB SSD and write are quicker as accessing both SSDs to maximise transfer speeds etc. However, the issue I'm now finding is that when the enclosure develops a fault (or one of the drives) you potentially lose everything! This is what I'm currently trying to avoid, hence my original post.

 

Understood, thanks for the info!

Correct, raid 0 will fail if any one component fails. Not sure what the process is for swapping enclosures. I would check the enclosure manual first. They may have specific steps for an easy swap.

I have limited raid knowledge but would you not prefer something fail proof like raid 1? You give up speed and loose the other 4tb but gain peace of mind. Raid 0 seems risky considering the fail rate of drives and enclosure evidently. A recent article said most ssds have a 70% fail rate after 3 years.

 

it is impossible to be 100% without knowing the specific design of the enclosure, but as a general rule you should be able to move the disks and retain your data (most NAS systems store the system data on disk, but some raid enclosures do basically nothing except change drive presentation). using raid 0 for data you want to keep (that you don't have backed up elsewhere) is not a great choice, you're basically doubling your chances of losing your data vs other strategies. I'd encourage trying for at least RAID 5.

it also highly depends on how the enclosure died, there's a big chance the death would take out your file system and a smaller chance it might take out your drives

 

Last edited: May 16, 2023

Give us the exact model and brand

If it is the EXACT same model, swapping HDD (SAME order) and setting switches the same before starting it SHOULD be enough.

There are exception to this rule when manufacturer change the CHIP inside the enclosure.