how to use two disk whithout raid

[Michael A. McKenney]

RAID 0 is never recommended for a production server. It is not supported by Microsoft, Novell and many Linux providers. Lose a disk and you lose the array. You should do RAID 1 for OS and paging/swap files. If you want to do two separate disks, One for OS and one for apps/data. That would be safer than RAID 0. I would get a proper backup solution other than ghosting. You need to recover your directory services.

[Johan Guldmyr]

Hey, so what OS are you running?

Making ghosts/copies of windows installations used to cause problems with the SID - which required some work afterwards. I do not know if this is the case.

How did you make a ghost of a disk? How did you try to restore it? Did you have the same hardware settings/raid setup?

HP has a tool called RDP - rapid deployment pack - which simplifies installations a lot (when it's working).

[Michael A. McKenney]

The problem with ghosting is hardware changes. Ghosting is not the best backup solution. You could setup a workstation and do disk to disk backups to it. I prefer a backup solution you can take offsite. We have been working with a Barracuda device to move three databases offsite. The 900 GB of data is still backed up to tape and took off site. The Barracuda is to make a psuedo DR site available.

[Gianfranco Ferrini]

Hi,

my problem is not backup, I want to clone an entire disk on another one.

I use acronis as clone software and, I repeat, it doesn't seem to be possible whith raid controller.

This is why I ask if it is possible to see one single disk without raid (if I want i can do raid also with linux software)

The OS that I use with my machines is RedHat 6.

Thanks.

[Michael A. McKenney]

You can do RAID 0 on single drives. You can replace the RAID controller with a SCSI/SAS controller.

[Torsten.]

Regarding the clone: Consider to create a RAID1 on 2 disks, so you can transfer the OS with the disk to another server.

Regarding RAID controller: I'm only aware of a single controller model where you can enable or disable RAID functionality, but this is in the BL860c i2 blade, not on proliant.

[Michael A. McKenney]

I would do RAID 1 on the two drives and get a separate backup solution like a USB 2 drive or tape backup solution. I would not do hard drive removal. The backplane is not designed for daily removal. You will damage a drive or backplane over time.

[Gianfranco Ferrini]

Thanks everyone for the answers.

The end result is that you cannot disable raid controller and clone disks must be done through backup systems.