Question about moving around drives and using Acronis

**Cybs** · 10-18-09, 05:28 PM

In one of my PCs, I have 4 drives in RAID and I want to take one of them out to use of a new build. All 4 drives a WD Black 500Gb drives.

Since WD offers Acronis True Image on their site for use with their drives, can I create an image of what I have now, remove the drive, reconfig the RAID for 3 drives and install that image? Will I run into issues with the Partition size changing? I've never used Acronis and the only experience I have with restoring backups is with Windows NTBackup.

**WileECyte** · 10-18-09, 08:30 PM

In my experience, you should be able to restore the image as long as the remaining space on the 3 drives is sufficient. It's been a while since I had to do any image work with Acronis though. Knock on wood, my Vista install has been bulletproof for almost 3 years. One more week and it won't matter.

**Cybs** · 10-19-09, 08:37 AM

I think what I'll do, since this computer is critical (Has all of my movies, photots, and music) is that I'll do the Acronis thing, an NTBackup, as well as do a backup on my Home Server.

**shatter99** · 10-19-09, 04:17 PM

I have 4 drives in RAID

What is you raid configuration? 0 or 1+0?

**Veovis** · 10-19-09, 05:09 PM

Originally Posted by shatter99

I have 4 drives in RAID

What is you raid configuration? 0 or 1+0?

I've never used RAID but I know enough about it to know there are even more possible setups than this... and which setup you're using will determine the answer to the original question.

**Imisnew2** · 10-19-09, 05:43 PM

I think what he's asking is... are you using RAID 4 or RAID 5 etc?

I don't know much about raid, but as far as removing a drive, I would say it's possible as long as you take all the data off of them to a temporary spot before you remove it.

My understanding of raid is :
If you have 4 drives, it will store data split up into 4 sections.
So all the data for a program is separated onto each of the 4 drives, which allows access to the data as a whole 4x faster... but if you want to remove a drive.. you'll need to "compile" all that data to the other three.. or a single one.. if that is possible? Worth looking into anyway.

**Cybs** · 10-20-09, 03:17 PM

It's setup in a RAID 0, no redundancy. It was part of a project I did a while ago to see how much throughput I could squeeze out of the system. I haven't done testing/measuring on my single WD Black drive, but the 4 disk RAID 0 doesn't feel much faster. Then again, it has Vista loaded and the single has Win 7 so who knows.

In the end, I think I was hamstringed by the lack of a high end RAID card (Another $300).