I am trying to add existing HDD to HP P812 Array Controller. I connected hard disks using mini-sas to SATA cable and configured each of them as logical (RAID 0) volumes individually. They appeared on lsblk but could not mount them.
My question is, is it possible to use normal SATA drives in a raid controller without loosing data. I have to move these disks between computers sometime and other computers do not have raid controllers.
Thanks
Well, moving disks in RAID to different computer without RAID support isn't wise idea.
Maybe it would work if you had RAID1 and you move just one of disks (RAID 1 would continue working in degraded mode). However it'd be just one way data transfer to the second node. If you'd return the disk back to your G7, the array controller would resynchronize the content with the first disk. In other words, everything added to the second disk on the second computer would be lost.
And you'd also had to take care of data integrity, because the P812 has 1GB cache, so disk writes can be not finished yet.
And yes, SATA drives are supported. However HPE only guarantees some models (can be found in quickspecs for DL580 G7). Other may work and also may behave unpredictably.
A single-drive RAID 0 volume isn't quite the same thing as a single drive connected to a non-RAID controller. Configuring a RAID volume involves writing metadata to the drive so that the controller remembers how it was configured across reboots. This metadata overwrote whatever data was originally on that portion of the drive, which could make the original data unrecoverable.
If you need drives to be portable between systems like that, then you want a controller that can operate in "HBA mode" (that is, the controller behaves like a non-RAID controller). The P812 can't do that, unfortunately. I believe you need a controller in the Px3x family or newer.
