I know how RAID work and prevent data lost from disks failures. I want to know is possible way/how easy to recover data from unfunctioned remaining RAID disks due to RAID controller failure or whole system failure. Can I even simply attach one of the RAID 1 disk to the desktop system and read as simple as USB disk? I know getting data from the other RAID types won’t be that simple but is there a way without building the whole RAID system again. Thanks.
I mean, recovery from parity data is how all of this works, this just doesn’t require you to have a controller, use a specific filesystem, have matching sized drives or anything else. Recovery is mostly like any other raid option I’ve ever used.
The only drawback is that the parity data is mostly equivalent in size to the actual data you’re making parity data of, and you need to keep a couple copies of indexes since if you lose the index or the parity data, no recovery for you.
In my case, I didn’t care: I’m using the oldest drives I’ve got as the parity drives, and the newer, larger drives for the data.
If i were doing the build now and not 5 years ago, I might pick a different solution but there’s something to be said for an option that’s dead simple (looking at you, zfs) and likely to be reliable because it’s not doing anything fancy (looking at you, btrfs).
From a usage (not technical) standpoint, the most equivalent commercial/prefabbed solution would probably be something like unraid.