I have a 2-drive RAID 0 that I would like to access using an external enclosure. These drives were salvaged from one of my mothballed systems. The SATA drives were in good working order and I would like to see what old data remains. System components have been robbed over the years so it would be much more convenient moving these drives to an external enclosure rather than trying to resurrect old system.
Can I potentially use something like this or are such designed to use starting from scratch with blank drives?
It’s theoretically possible you could find another device that used the same proprietary RAID controller as your old PC, but that seems unlikely. Just to give you an idea of some of the variables that could be different:
the underlying filesystem used by the RAID controller
the location of any control blocks for settings/configuration
the interleave pattern between the two drives
the block sizes of any low level data organization
The interleave pattern is an interesting one. Imagine that the controller was designed to write a sector to drive 0 and then a sector to drive 1. That would allow a certain speed improvement because writes could be in parallel. But then imagine the controller has a lot of RAM, and it is more efficient to write ten blocks as a group to drive 0 followed by ten blocks to drive 1. There is just no way to be certain what design considerations the RAID controller designers might have used.