Hard drive array questions

**mthomasdev** · 03-13-2022, 09:13 AM

If a hard drive was removed from an array and then placed in a Thermatake Black Duet external drive port, should it show up on your computer?

Can drives that are removed from arrays, be tested, wiped and reused in desktops?

**mikeinreco** · 03-13-2022, 09:47 AM

I've had issues myself with hard drive's in certain raid formats as well.........Hopefully someone with more knowledge will impart their wisdom

**matador** · 03-13-2022, 07:27 PM

Generally, yes, they should work. I haven't used the dock you're using though. If you're trying to wipe the drives and give them a basic health check, I'd go a different route personally. What I'd do is grab an old desktop computer with SATA on the motherboard (Like all of us don't have one of them floating around, right?) and plug it in directly that way. Then, I'd boot that computer to wiping software on a USB drive. That way Windows won't be trying to even deal with the Array, and you'll also not have to worry about blanking your own hard drive instead of the one you want blanked. There is fancy disk testing stuff, but DBAN will probably be fine for you. You can then take the blanked drive, plug that into Windows, and test with Crystal Disk Info or your other testing software of choice

**aurum** · 07-09-2022, 08:52 PM

Originally Posted by matador

Generally, yes, they should work. I haven't used the dock you're using though. If you're trying to wipe the drives and give them a basic health check, I'd go a different route personally. What I'd do is grab an old desktop computer with SATA on the motherboard (Like all of us don't have one of them floating around, right?) and plug it in directly that way. Then, I'd boot that computer to wiping software on a USB drive.

I have done it the same way many times, so far did not have any issues.

**hills** · 07-10-2022, 04:20 AM

I'm using a Star Tech dual port dock. Not sure about raid HDD's .... but Mac HDD's will generally be recognized by a win OS but not launch.

Type in disk management in the white lower left search box and launch that app.

If the HDD is any good .... it should show up there. You can delete partitions -or- make partitions active there.

If the HDD isn't showing up ... i most generally assume it's a firmware issue on the drive logic board.

**Bear** · 10-13-2022, 10:08 PM

depends if you're planning to use the array or not, and how you wish to use the drives. To simply examine a drive I'd set its jumpers to be a secondary on your test PC and go from there.

**kss** · 10-14-2022, 06:10 AM

Depends on the RAID type. If it is a RAID type where it stripes the data across the drives then you will not be able to recover it easily and the computer may or may not read it. For example if you have 2 disks, in raid-1, then the data is spread across both disks, so if you only have one, you only have half the data, and it is broken/split at a byte/sector level so its not like one file is here and one is there, the data itself is split across the harddrive at the block level, so if you have 4k block size for example, and a 16k file, it could have chunk 1 on drive A, chunk 2 on drive B, chunk 3 on drive A, chunk 4 on drive B. So if you just plug in drive B, you only have chunk 2 and 4 of that file.

This is a basic example, but if its in a striped array you are pretty boned if you only have 1 drive.

BUT if you dont care about the data and just want to wipe it, that should be doable regardless of the raid config.