Question : Problem: How do you recover from a RAID 5/RAID 6 controller failure?

My home media server is starting to push the limits of what I can do with RAID 1, currently I have 3 mirrors of 1TB disks, so 6 1TB drives mirrored into 3 visible drives.

I want to get more out of these 6 drives by using a more advanced raid solution to accomplish redundancy. However, in all the solutions I've read they always talk about what happens if any one of the drives fail. Okay, what happens if the controller fails?

If my controller fails or the mirror breaks on my RAID 1's, I'm left with 2 drives that are completely usable individually. If you have an expensive RAID 5 / 6 controller and it fails, can you migrate your drives from one controller to another easily? Is the distributed parity (I think that's what it's called) technique the same for all controllers of the same raid level or do different manufacturers distribute parity differently?

Answer : Problem: How do you recover from a RAID 5/RAID 6 controller failure?

Luckily I haven't had my Raid controllers die too often, but it has happened. The Raid array information is on the drives as well as the controller. I was able to get things back up and going by swapping out to a new controller. I believe that you do have to be careful to keep the same type of controller, firmware version, etc... I don't believe it could just be swapped out for any sort of Raid controller. Another thing to be mindful of is to keep your discs in the proper order. If you have to take them out they need to stay in the same order when you put them back in.