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I have a new OWC Gemini Thunderbolt 3 RAID enclosure which is configured as a RAID 1 array mirroring (2) 16TB disks. Since I added my own new disks to the enclosure, I assume that they were not certified by OWC before shipping as they would have been in an already-built enclosure. In SoftRAID XT, when mounted, this hardware RAID 1 is presented as a single 16TB disk.
Before I put this into "production," I would like to certify both disks in order to attain the highest reliability possible.
Can SoftRAID XT certify both disks simultaneously during each pass on a hardware RAID 1 mirror? If not, it's my understanding that I'd have to re-configure the disks as JBOD, then certify the disks a separate disks, which can be done simultaneously in that mode.
I haven't been able to find any information about whether SoftRAID XT is able to certify disks already set up in a hardware RAID 1 configuration and hope you can offer some insights.
Thanks.
This topic was modified 10 months ago 4 times by raven907
Posted : 21/07/2022 9:16 pm
You can certify it, but if there is an error, you won't know which disk.
So I would indeed put them into JBOD single disk mode, certify, then reset the enclosure to RAID mode. You can do either, but I personally would do the latter.
Posted : 21/07/2022 9:33 pm
Topic starter
I questioned that if I could certify both disks while in a hardware RAID 1 array that there may not be a way to correlate disk errors to physical disks. It would seem that an advantage of using SoftRAID to create a RAID 1 array (from JBOD) is that you'd be able to identify disk errors using the Disk Health Monitoring feature that shows the details of individual disks in a volume.
When re-creating the hardware RAID 1 array in the OWC Gemini enclosure, would Slot A be the primary disk and Slot B be the mirrored secondary disk?
Thanks again.
Posted : 21/07/2022 10:23 pm
With hardware RAID, I don't think this (primary/secondary) concept exists. Both drives are written to and both read from equally. It depends on the hardware RAID controller chip, how it is designed.
Posted : 21/07/2022 11:54 pm
Topic starter
I wondered if the primary and secondary disk hierarchy might be lost in a hardware RAID 1 given that the mirroring is managed by a RAID controller chip vs by software.
I'll mark this inquiry as Solved.
Thanks again.
Posted : 22/07/2022 12:50 am
