I once tried this as part of a disaster recovery test. As Lister already pointed out, the only guarantee of success is using a dedicated RAID controller and have a spare one (or two) waiting for their golden moment. In my particular case I tested two different scenarios: Move only the disk to an other identical machine. Move the disk an the controller. Both went flawlessly.
If your business case dictates such a quick exchange of hardware it is almost certainly worth it spending a couple hundred bucks for an easy swap solution. If you just have two hours of work instead of four, it already paid for itself. If you find it difficult to justify the cost, you might consider software raid instead, while it is cheaper you need to take a performance hit into account.
I strongly advice against using on-board of a mother board. Most solutions are only half backed and have all sorts of quirks and pitfalls. Like only one halfe of the sata ports can actually be used in a raid, or using the host cpu for parity operations, making the host almost unresponsive during a rebuild and other fun stuff. More than once I saved a system by just grabbing a replacement controller from ebay, even long after EOL of the product. That might be difficult with many consumer grade motherboards
It appears that if you use a hardware RAID controller then you should able to easily migrate but if the array is using the mobo onboard controller then you may need to reinitialise the array (and thus each disk) to recreate the array... – Kinnectus – 2016-08-02T12:50:50.247
I guess I am talking about an onboard controller such as the HP Smart Array B140i found on HP servers – nowox – 2016-08-02T12:52:35.207
Worth mentioning that Linux
md
RAID5 is fully portable. I had to do this myself after a BIOS update bricked my Intel DZ68DB mobo. I connected my four 3TB hard drives with a RAID10f2/
and/home
, and RAID5/data
to an old Core2 motherboard, and my Ubuntu install booted and worked just fine (after a tweak to mark the MBR-compatible backwards compat partition table "bootable", since the old mobo doesn't boot GPT.) – Peter Cordes – 2016-08-02T17:20:57.783