Can a mirrored (RAID-1) disk be plugged into another system to be read?

"regardless of any controller/driver

Disregarding RAID implementation? Then the answer should generally be no: you can not assume that all hardware controllers treat disks in such a transparent way.

However, in the case of software raid in Linux (md+raid1) then yes, there's no disk header or secret block-level optimization going on there.

In the case of Disk Mirroring in Windows, it involves the disk having been initialized as ""Dynamic"" and, well, should just work, given that the system that reads it can understand the dynamic volumes - in other word it will most likely only be accessible from another system running Windows.

In the end; you can try connecting the disk regardless of controller. If it works, it works. No controller will damage the data on the disk as long as you don't tell it to - i.e. as long as you don't execute an operation such as ""initialize"" or anything."

"You won't necessarily be able to access the disk as just a normal disk, but you should be able to instruct you local system to access it as part of a degraded RAID-1 array and read the data just fine.

If you need to do this and are using hardware RAID, you would need the same kind of card, or in case of software RAID you would need the same software.

Note that some implementations make it look like the disk is a normal disk with a normal disk header, but I would be very wary of just using it as-is; the RAID information might conceivably be tucked in there somewhere and ruin your day."