HDD GURU FORUMS

Hi,

can some one give me a hint, what I can do? A friend of a friend has a 24x 600GB Raid-5 disk array. The HDDs are fine, but the controller most likely is gone. The IT support tried to replace the controller, but the new one did now work, I have no idea why. So my idea was to clone the drives, before they are doing something to the RAID. The reason for my suggestion is because the company has absolutely no backups of the data.

Here in my lab I have PC-3000 SAS for this. But I'm about 700km away from the disk array. So the question is, how it's possible to clone a SAS drive (to an Image File)? The problem is, that the most SAS controllers want to create a new RAID with the drive. And this is going to write something on the disk. But what's about JBOD for example? Will this give me the direct access to the drive for imaging?

You need a dumb SAS HBA, not a RAID controller. RAID controller will write its metadata, overwriting whatever is on the disk, even if the new array is created as JBOD or RAID0 of one disk.

Use SAS Write-Blocker

The SuperMicro AOC-SASLP-MV8 is an example of a non-raid controller that will work. Someone recommended it to me, and with it I can access individual SAS disks in Linux for cloning out of the box with no need to install any drivers. I bought it used as it is obsolete. The newer model AOC-SAS2LP-MV8 states "JBOD mode only. No RAID support". That would be what you are looking for, as stated a "dumb" controller that does not support hardware raid.

I just landed a SATSASDUP11 from Startech. We have SAS cards too, but it is nice to plug and play.

lcoughey wrote:I just landed a SATSASDUP11 from Startech. We have SAS cards too, but it is nice to plug and play.

Yikes! That's a bit pricey!