Thomas A. Anderson wrote: > Which bring me to my final question, just for closure. > > If hardware raid (like if I bought a controller), would it be any > different, if I removed the drives and just put on one another machine > -- would I be able to see the data on it like a normal drive? Or would I > run into the same issue??
Much worse. If you had done this correctly, you can take a set of drives from a working mdadm system and bring them to another computer and use mdadm to import them and use them. Depending on which options you chose and which drives you brought over, you could potentially do this with fewer drives than "all". (The same is true of ZFS and BTRFS.) On every hardware RAID system that I know of, you need the same hardware RAID on the receiving system -- sometimes just a compatible card, sometimes precisely the same card. -dsr-
