Upgrading RST enterprise Driver and Management Console from 5.3.1.1016 to 5.3.1.1019 - is it possible without losing existing RAID 0 arrays?

[BShpu]

Hi,

I have a DELL tower (Xeon W-2155 CPU, VROC enabled) that's slightly less than half a year old, and comes with Intel RST enterprise Driver & Management Console v. 5.3.1.1016 pre-installed. I have two RAID 0 arrays (of 2 disks each) on it, managed by Intel RST. I'm running Windows 10 Pro for Workstations, version 1803.

Now a DELL system monitoring/update utility has been pestering me for months to update the RSTe driver & console to 5.3.1.1019 (which DELL obviously believes is compatible with my system) - the putative advantage being "improved system stability". Technically, I don't mind giving it a shot, but it seems I can't update the RST driver without uninstalling my current version of RST first.

Yet, I fear that by uninstalling the current version of RST I'll lose my existing RAID 0 arrays (and the data upon them). Am I right? Or, is it safe to uninstall RST, install the newer version, and my RAID 0 arrays will "come back" automagically, with all their contents intact?

[n_scott_pearson]

Suppose you had a separate drive, say an SSD, as your Windows System drive and suppose that this drive somehow became corrupted to the point where you were required to reinstall Windows. You wouldn't expect this to cause you to lose the contents of your separate RAID arrays, would you? That wouldn't be very good. No, the RST/RSTe subsystem in the chipset, supported by the RST/RSTe (BIOS extension) firmware, will maintain your RAID arrays just fine - and, in fact, would have done so even if you never installed the package at all (all you would be missing is the ability to monitor the status of these RAID arrays). You should be able to upgrade the package, even if by uninstall/install cycle, without having any effect on the RAID arrays.

All that said, it's better to be safe than sorry. Always, always, always ensure that you are regularly making backups of the contents of your RAID arrays and always ensure that these backups are up-to-date - and it's been verified that they can be restored from* - before making any changes to the supporting software.

Hope this helps,

...S

* I have heard of many cases where folks diligently made backups of their drives but, when they ran into a problem and had to actually use these backups, discovered that they could not restore from them.