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I have a LSI 9260-4i RAID card plus 1x 300GB Drive. My issue is I have to ship out the server for the 2nd drive to be installed onsite.

Can I configure a RAID 1 with only 1 drive, and plug in the 2nd 300GB drive at a later date? I can not figure out exactly the proper way to accomplish this.

The 300GB drive is the Windows Server boot drive which I need on a RAID1, but I need to install and configure everything before shipping.

Update: Resolved

I found a spare 1.5TB drive in my office and used this drive to build the RAID1 for the 300GB drive. This allowed me to install all the necessary software needed and perform the needed configurations.

Then I removed the 2nd drive, and shipped the server with the degraded RAID1. Once at the location, we popped in the 2nd 300GB drive, let the RAID1 rebuild and put the server into production with no issues.

Damainman
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    Not a professional-grade question... – Magellan Jul 18 '13 at 05:00
  • Under Linux MD, you could build a *degraded* array than repair them lather: `mdadm --create md0 --level=1 --raid-devices=2 /dev/sda1 "missing"`. But I agree with @Adrian, this has nothing to do there... – F. Hauri - Give Up GitHub Jul 18 '13 at 08:22
  • @Adrian , can you explain why this is not a professional grade question? So I won't make the same mistake again? Also I posted this question in serverfault because I seen other RAID related questions. It looks like this was closed off due to not belonging to server fault. Can someone please provide further insight? Closing a question without hinting to what might have prevented it from being closed, is not really beneficial in my opinion. – Damainman Jul 23 '13 at 19:03
  • As attested by the downvotes, this is not something that should be done in nor condoned for a production environment. SF is a Q&A site for IT Professionals managing production environments. There are other sites on the SE network that are perfectly accepting of quirky and/or esoteric questions, but they are not on-topic here. I suggest reading the About and Help links at the top of the page for full details. – Magellan Jul 23 '13 at 22:55
  • Yep, I read the Q&A in the help center and my question did not relate to a home or test environment. My question and solution was related to a production Xenserver environment for a small business in a remote location. But it is all good as I found the solution to my issue. Next time I'll just post in Super User. – Damainman Jul 24 '13 at 09:00

2 Answers2

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No. You cannot build a RAID 1 array with fewer than two drives.

Skyhawk
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RAID stands for Redundant Array of Inexpensive (Independent) Disks and not RAID stands for Redundant Array of Inexpensive (Independent) Disk .

No RAID level is possible with fewer than 2 Disks.

Abhishek Anand Amralkar
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    Many controllers will allow the user to configure a single-disk RAID-0 array, although there is obviously no benefit in terms of redundancy. – Skyhawk Jul 18 '13 at 05:35