From: "Frank Haber" 

John, or anybody...  Some NT software RAID 1 questions:

o Does "importing" the dynamic drive "touch" it, so
it's no longer a part of the original array?  How about putting an NTFS4
drive in, say, an XP Pro computer?  Are there BIOS issues >137GB?

Now onwards to normal operation:

o Do you guys keep exact-same PATA spare drives on the shelf?  Ever hit a
subtle drive firmware incompatibility between revs of the alleged
"same" drive?  Could you actually use, say, a Seagate 250 as
replacement for a failed Maxtor 250 and be happy?  How about a Seagate 400
- will it rebuild as a "250" and run?

o If you have some standardization of boxen in your shop, is there any
point in keeping said spares as "hot" spares, ready to install in
a spare box?  (To explain: "rebuild" to a blank drive some
night/weekend, then put the original drive back in and keep the clone on
the shelf as a hot spare, contents only months old.)

And how about spare RAID 5 HW controllers?  You guys keep spares of these? Same rev?

(I'm gunshy, since most of my experience has been with motherboard PATA
hardware RAID 1 and with Promise, et. al. PCI controllers.  Lots of gotchas
there.)

--- BBBS/NT v4.01 Flag-5