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Here's what I'm hoping to do:

  • Have two drives in a hardware bay that can be pulled from the front without dissassembly
  • Read and write to it as a single (NTFS) disk
  • Be able to pull either drive and plug it into any windows machine as a NTFS disk with no recovery tools

I understand that this is sort of RAID-1 like, but the drives have to be NTFS and directly usable when pulled, which I don't think is the case with RAID-1 devices, and I don't want or need network attachment.

This sounds more like block-level or bit-level replication/mirroring hardware. Does this exist?

Ehryk
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  • Perhaps this qualifies? The part I'm not sure about is whether or not if I pull one out in Mirrored / RAID1 mode, if that can be just plugged into any ol' windows box and mounted as a normal NTFS volume. http://www.startech.com/HDD/Enclosures/trayless-raid-enclosure-usb-esata~S352BU33RER – Ehryk Oct 09 '15 at 03:23

1 Answers1

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You can probably use raid, pull it and plug it in somewhere else, but that is dependant on the raid implementation. Raid-1 is generally two disks that are exactly the same, other than that they are normal disks/filesystems. I see no reason why this wouldn't work.

That said, I have a bad feeling about using raid in this way. Something might go wrong one day. Call me suspicious.

You could also just synchronize the two disks on a regular basis if the data doesn't have to be instantly up to date. Using rsync or something. Once the data is first copied, it could be pretty fast to synchronize after that.

Ryan Babchishin
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  • I was thinking I could perhaps use some scheduled rsync jobs, but was wondering if there are hardware based solutions first. How could I tell how the RAID-1 was implemented? Is there a name for this type of feature? – Ehryk Oct 09 '15 at 04:21
  • I have no idea. Every raid-1 implementation I've seen doesn't do anything weird with the disks. – Ryan Babchishin Oct 09 '15 at 04:23