(Q) Easiest way to setup - want to boot from NVMe raid on 1 month old system? must start from scratch?

[jwwagner25]

Hi all, 

 

My system is one month old and unfortunately I didn't set it up right the first time. I'm wondering...

 

Can I install/setup 'raid' so that I am booting from both m.2 SSD's, without fully re-installing windows?

 

I believe the answer is no, but wanted to get others' opinion. I searched the forum (and elsewhere) and can't find a concrete answer.

 

The end goal is to have one volume 4TB in size that is the primary drive, rather than two separate 2TB ones. I don't need help with the install itself, just want to know if it can be done without deleting everything and starting over w/clean install of windows. Much thanks in advance for your time & assistance. 

[Fasauceome]

Not only can you not set up raid without wiping the drive, you also wouldn't want to.

 

Raid is more volatile than standard storage setups, as I'm sure you're aware. Something happens to one drive, both lose the data (in this particular setup). If you can't handle wiping your current drive setup now and starting fresh, I can't recommend raid for your boot drive since it's all too likely you'd have to do it more than once in the future, in the long term.

 

There's also not a tangible benefit, unless you're handling very massive files, in which case this problem would have been solved by you immediately cause you actually needed it.

[Eigenvektor]

Sounds like you want RAID 0 for your boot drive. I'd recommend against that. If one drive fails the data on both drives is useless. You've essentially doubled your risk of data loss. Since you have NVMe which is already plenty fast, you'll not get any appreciable performance improvement either.

 

I don't know if it can actually be done (probably not), but I assume you'd have to backup your drive, then create a RAID and then restore the backup to the RAID array.

[SupaKomputa]

17 minutes ago, jwwagner25 said:

The end goal is to have one volume 4TB in size that is the primary drive

If this for the system drive, you need to setup the raid volume in the motherboard not windows.

For the windows installation, you may want to clone it to a temporary drive and then clone back after you setup the raid (you need a bootable cloner for this).

If it fails, do a fresh install.

[Dedayog]

29 minutes ago, jwwagner25 said:

Hi all, 

 

My system is one month old and unfortunately I didn't set it up right the first time. I'm wondering...

 

Can I install/setup 'raid' so that I am booting from both m.2 SSD's, without fully re-installing windows?

 

I believe the answer is no, but wanted to get others' opinion. I searched the forum (and elsewhere) and can't find a concrete answer.

 

The end goal is to have one volume 4TB in size that is the primary drive, rather than two separate 2TB ones. I don't need help with the install itself, just want to know if it can be done without deleting everything and starting over w/clean install of windows. Much thanks in advance for your time & assistance. 

I'd get a 500GB boot drive, and then RAID 0 the other 2 drives like you mention for a large data/library drive.

 

I prefer to separate my drives these days, and since mentioned that RAID is more volatile it's not a good choice for booting.

[jwwagner25]

Thanks all for the replies. I ended up doing it anyway. Aside from the 5 seconds of elation at seeing the CDM sequential numbers of 6,000 GB/sec read/write, I can say the exercise was as pointless as you all said it would be. 

 

I will be getting rid of the RAID0 and going back to just having each nvme drive separate once I get my new processor in the next few days. Thanks again for the help.