Building RAID0 on non-boot drives

Kiro-San

Kiro-San

Kiro-San

Associate
Joined
19 Jan 2005
Posts
197
Location
In bed, asleep.
My current 480meg SSD (used to store my games) is getting kind of full and so I've decided to add a second (480meg) to the system.

As I'd like the drives to be treated as one big drive (cause I get slightly OCD about drive letters, so sue me ;p ), get a bit of a performance bump (even though in real world terms it won't be that great) and data integrity isn't that important (as I just got a NAS for Xmas and all my data is backed up onto there now).

As such I'm planning on sticking the other drive in the system and then making the two drives (identical models/capacity) into a RAID0 array. It doesn't look too complex and there's plenty of guides etc about however I have one question:

Do I need to format the drive, add the new drive in, build the array and then copy everything back over to it? Or will the data automatically be split between the two when the array is built (I feel like it's going to be a no)? This is on a Windows 7 Pro 64bit machine and a MSI Gaming 7 (Z97) motherboard. Cheers all.

Edit: Heh, 100 posts, only took me 10 years!
 
No, your data will not be automatically handled. RAID is a block level technology, not a byte level one. (At least when handled at Motherboard/BIOS level)

You should not need to format, simply placing the two drives into an array and then initialising it will nuke both drives data and give you a fresh, uninitialised volume in Windows to partition and format.

You will need to:

Backup your data
Verify it (optional but advisable)
Add both disks to a RAID-0 Array
Boot into Windows
Initialise a basic Disk from the presented volume
Partition it
Format it
Restore Data


My advice - Don't RAID it, use them as single drives. If drive letters really bother you that much, use a symbolic link to the other drive.
 
Why not try something like Stablebit Drivepool. It's basically software raid. Add your existing drive to a new "pool", all your data will be preserved, then add the other drive to the pool. You'll end up with one drive letter with the combined capacity of both. And you can keep adding drives to the pool as time goes on without needing to reformat.

You won't get the performance boost like you would from RAID0 but it's infinitely more flexible

EDIT\ you could even add a HDD to the pool and tell it which games (or more specifically folders) you want on the SSDs and which on the HDD. From windows perspective this would still all be one drive letter.
 
Last edited:
Yeh I'd much rather stick with the hardware RAID offered by the Intel chipset. Anyhow, disk has arrived but I'm away this weekend so it'll be going in next week.

Verified the backup to the NAS as well to make sure I don't lose anything.
 
Kiro-San said:
Yeh I'd much rather stick with the hardware RAID offered by the Intel chipset.
Click to expand...

That's not hardware RAID, its a drive controller with a BIOS that implements software RAID.

Don't worry though, in 2015 software RAID is just as good if not better than hardware RAID for most users.
 
Whilst it is Pseudo-hardware RAID on an Intel chipset. It's much better than FULL software raid which is provided at the OS/Kernel layer.

At least the chipset provides hardware LEVEL raid.
 
Sin_Chase said:
Whilst it is Pseudo-hardware RAID on an Intel chipset. It's much better than FULL software raid which is provided at the OS/Kernel layer.
Click to expand...

The only real differences are that BIOS RAID has the advantage that the boot partition can be on the array whereas it can't with software RAID (unless running a Windows Server O/S), and that software RAID arrays can be exported to any machine running a compatible O/S whereas BIOS RAID arrays require a board with compatible storage controller.

Performance and reliability are the same with both as it's still the CPU doing all the work.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom