Can I safely reinstall Windows if my second disk is a Windows RAID 0 Array

[FlaredXm1m1X]

Hi,

 

A while ago, I made a Raid 0 with two 1 TB Hard Drives with the Windows disk manager. Now I need to reinstall Windows because I have some bugs and I just want to clean install it.

 

My question is : Can I safely reinstall Windows on my C: Drive (Format the C: Drive and then install Windows from scratch with a USB stick) without losing any data from my RAID 0 array ?

 

I'm scared that the new Windows installation will not recognize my array, and that would mean that i lost everything on it.

 

Attached is a printscreen of my Disk Manager. Red = my two 1 TB disk (my Raid array) and Blue = My 120 GB boot disk.

 

 

Thanks in advance.

[Jay_JWLH]

Since you are using your OS to handle your RAID instead of an external hardware solution, I can see your concern. If you do go ahead and do it, you should be sure to perform a full backup first to prevent any data loss. Something you should be doing anyway since you have a RAID array that is twice as likely to fail (or you could half ass it and use JBOD). Once you do a OS reinstall, I'm assuming you could just pick things up from Disk Manager, and reinitialise them both together since there is information about the array at the start of one or both disks. I'm tempted to run a VM test it out.

 

Side note: RAID 0 is most useful when accessing large files, but does very little to improve things like boot times and program load times. You may have already done a speed comparison when you set it up to see what it does for each different sizes of data chunks. For things like accessing small bits of data quickly (including booting from it, and starting up programs), SSD's are great.

[lloose]

On 11/30/2019 at 5:45 PM, Jay_JWLH said:

Since you are using your OS to handle your RAID instead of an external hardware solution, I can see your concern. If you do go ahead and do it, you should be sure to perform a full backup first to prevent any data loss. Something you should be doing anyway since you have a RAID array that is twice as likely to fail (or you could half ass it and use JBOD). Once you do a OS reinstall, I'm assuming you could just pick things up from Disk Manager, and reinitialise them both together since there is information about the array at the start of one or both disks. I'm tempted to run a VM test it out.

 

Side note: RAID 0 is most useful when accessing large files, but does very little to improve things like boot times and program load times. You may have already done a speed comparison when you set it up to see what it does for each different sizes of data chunks. For things like accessing small bits of data quickly (including booting from it, and starting up programs), SSD's are great.

I agree completely with this. Its not worth raid 0 with mechanical hard disks anymore. A 1tb Sata ssd is really cheap, and will absolutely blow away a raid 0 mechanical drive setup in every metric.

 

If you insist on doing raid, I suggest you do hardware raid. I dont know if you can install an OS to a Windows controlled raid anyways.

[Jay_JWLH]

On 12/5/2019 at 10:21 AM, lloose said:

If you insist on doing raid, I suggest you do hardware raid. I dont know if you can install an OS to a Windows controlled raid anyways.

You can, but you may have to find a way to get the driver file for the RAID card onto the installation media, or during install via something like USB. Assuming it doesn't have something included by default.