going from RAID1 to JBOD

[Paul Unger]

I'm asking this here because I tend to get the best answers around here!

I have a dual HD enclosure that supports RAID0, RAID1, JBOD and BIG. Initially, I had it set to RAID1. Then I heard disk noises... So, having heard horror stories about RAID arrays getting messed up, I decided to try to split the array into two single disks.

The documentation that came with the device says of JBOD that, "JBOD enables each hard drive to be seen as separate independent drives. If only a single hard drive is installed, ensure this mode is enabled." [Of BIG it says, "BIG concatenates multiple hard drives into a single large disk. Provides no performance or redundancy benefits."] I'm not sure that those are standard uses of the labels, but based on the manufacturer's description, I flicked the switch to JBOD and all my data appeared to be there, on both disks.

My friend loaned me a Thermaltake BLACX Duet 5G so I could look at the drives in a different environment. This is where the weirdness starts... If I pop both of my disks in, I can navigate to a top level folder, but as soon as I try to go deeper Windows 7 Explorer goes into (Not Responding) mode. With just one disk in, I can do anything I want: navigate, copy, paste, etc. But obviously, I'd want to be able to make use of both slots. So I'm not quite sure what to make of it... My disks were in JBOD mode in my enclosure; would that screw things up if they were side by side in another environment? Is there anything written to the disk to say, "This disk is running in this mode [and it won't run properly in a different mode"?

I'd be happy to hear any advice / experience anyone has to share,

Paul

[wkw]

You are trying to get the data off the disks, right?
I'd try the good old USB-sata dock, just a regular one, no fancy dock.
IF that fails, plug it right in to your board via internal sata or esata

[Paul Unger]

No, I have the data backed up to a third drive. I just want to use the two disks that had been in a RAID1 arrangement in a different way (i.e., on their own, but with exact duplicates of the data; no RAID mumbo jumbo as obviously I'm a bit confused about how it works... )

[jdk]

If you want a perfect mirror of the contents of each drive, put it back in the RAID 1 configuration. Any decent enclosure will warn you when one of the drives dies, and should allow you to hot-swap a new drive without data loss.