On Fri, 9 Sep 2005, Bryan J. Smith wrote: > Peter Arremann <loony at loonybin.org> wrote: >> When initializing a raid 1, the controller wipes out all >> data according to the manuals. Every now and then you hear >> from people that say that the controller copies everything >> from disk1 to disk2 and if your IDE controller sector >> mapping matches what the 3ware controller does, you can >> keep your data in tact. > > Actually, for RAID-1, 3Ware does _not_ using additional > blocking/organization, and does a direct mirror. I.e., the > disks _can_ be used "normally." > > For RAID-0, 10 and 5, 3Ware uses 32KiB blocking and the > volumes are completely _unusable_ by anything else AFAIK > (maybe LVM2-MD?). That's not entirely correct. The 3Ware disks almost use standard raid format, it's just the raid block on each disk that is written at the end of the disk I believe instead of at the beginning. About a year a go we rescued all data from a series of PATA disks from a friend of mine when his 3Ware went bust. We were able to start the array in software raid with the right parameters. Google was my friend then