I have a 3Ware Escalade 7500 4-channel IDE RAID card and three 80gb drives (two Western Digital and one Samsung). This is a RAID-5 setup.

Through events I could not control, the drives are no longer connected and do not have records of what order the drives were connected (which drives were connected to which channels/ports on the physical RAID card).

I desperately need to recover the data from these drives. What I need to know is whether anyone knows for certain if the card MUST have the exact same drives (brand, serial number, etc) plugged into the same channel on the card in order to work? What will happen if I plug the Samsung drive where one of the Western Digital drives used to be and plug one of the Western Digital drives in what used to be a free slot, for example?

Thank you very much.

You should ask 3Ware about your problem because they can give you better advice. If you have not made any backups and you do not want to screw up the data, then take your drives to a data recovery service. A data recovery service should put your RAID-5 array together. For any RAID setups, it is best to use the same brand, model, and capacity. Also when dealing with IDE or any hard drive that is going to be used in RAID setups, turn off autolocation of bad sectors and turn off cache. I recommend using the dd utility to make an image of all the drives in the array and store them in seperate image files on a 300+ GB hard drive if you are thinking of attempting to reconstruct the array your self.

Yeah, my original plan has been to use dd to create images of all three drives so that - in the worst case scenerio - I could just re-image the drives and try the slots again until I got it right.

Fortunately, the drives should be in good shape. They just need to be stuck back in the RAID so they can be put in action again.

I'm just glad it's only a 3-drive RAID. I'd be really screwed if it was six or eight. Too many combinations.