Raid 0 help

[Pwent]

I’m running out of space on my SSD boot drive, I don’t know why I want all these programs on it but I do. So, bought a second matching SSD. What is the best way to install the old SSD and the New SSD and retain all of my crap that’s on the old SSD like windows, etc? 

[Glassed Silver]

DO NOT USE RAID-0.

 

Especially not for a simple setup like that. There is ZERO reason to use RAID-0 here.

 

Just add it as second drive with the drive letter D or whatever is free and keep Windows and other stuff on C, moving some easy to move programs to D and add anything new to D as well.

 

RAID-0 is great for making YouTube videos showcasing ridiculous speeds and stuff like that. For productivity... It's just asking for trouble. And yes, there are SOME use cases for it that are legit, but they are far away from what OP wants.

 

Edit: But since we're here to learn more than might be necessary. IF you were to setup RAID-0, you'd need a motherboard supporting RAID configuration or a RAID card. (that'd plug into the PCIe slot.)

 

And I would strongly advise against using crap cards, there are real quality differences and if your RAID card dies you want to be able to easily obtain a fitting replacement to be able to get your array back online. So the cheap Chinese offers you see on eBay might NOT be the best buy.

 

But again, don't use RAID-0. I just added that to entertain the hypothetical thought.

 

The major problem with RAID in general is that the controller might recognize a drive as bad when in reality it just took a little too long to respond. This isn't such an uncommon problem and whilst with normal RAID configurations (RAID 0 strictly speaking isn't even a RAID, because there is no redundancy) you might be looking at wasting an otherwise good drive and replacing it with a brand new one and keeping your array and all its data intact (BIG ASTERISK), with RAID 0 you'd be losing all your data without major headaches and troubleshooting. You don't want to deal with that and frankly speaking not even very very tech savvy people want to deal with it. RAID 0 would typically be found in use cases where the two drives combine their speed to become a very snappy cache.

 

Now of course you'll be backing up all your important data so even a RAID 0 turning belly up wouldn't get the best of you, at least I hope you keep backups, but still... You don't need everything staying one drive [letter] (logical volume), so why introduce another point of failure and adding more maintenance once you need to replace drives?

 

No need. Two volumes, keep it simple buddy.

[SkilledRebuilds]

The idea is nice but yeah don't Raid0 a booting volume.

 

I use two old SSDs (2*256) for a secondary Games drive. 3years and counting,.. Updates installing and less loading times are nice but the original reason I joined them is just to have a simple 1drive 500GB data pool for D:\Games

 

I'm willing to sacrifice time fixing future ills because that Game data gets checked and updated, Backups are scheduled each month for the game update/folder data to another drive at 4am.

 

I'd just save for a bigger single drive.

Pricing is as good as its going to get but don't go super cheap for a boot SSD either as you can 100% them at boot and under heavy writes quite easily... Research SSDs and why to avoid cheap ones maybe...

[FloRolf]

When creating a Raid all the drives will be formatted so you are losing your stuff anyways. 

 

You should either:

Get one large drive and replace your current one

Or

Get a second drive and put it in additionally as a second drive independently. 

 

And definitely:

Do off-site backups. 

[Pwent]

I appreciate it! You talked me into a bigger SSD. 

 

Yes, my mb supports Raid0. Yes everything is always backed up.