Help setting up RAID 0 please!

the5thorseman · October 26, 2015

Hey guys. I currently have a 2tb hard drive for my main drive, and a secondary 1tb. Someone I know is getting rid of their computer and told me I can have the hard drive in their computer, which is also 1tb so I figured the best thing to do with it is to set up the two 1tb drives in RAID 0. Problem is that I have no idea how to do that. Any help would be appreciated! I'm currently running Windows 10. If you need to know anything else, just let me know.

matto97 · October 26, 2015

Captain_WD · October 26, 2015

~snip~

Hey there the5thorseman,

RAID0 offers a pretty good speed boost to the performance of the drives but not all types of usage can benefit from it. For example RAID0 will make little to none difference in gaming. On the other hand, Striped arrays (RAID0) increases significantly the chance of data loss as if either of the drives fail, you'd lose all the data on the whole array. I would strongly recommend keeping backups of your data if you do decide to go with the striped array.

Depending if you want to boot from it or have it as secondary storage option, you can either set up a hardware RAID from the BIOS (you should have a guide in your motherboard manual on how to do that if it supports it) or set up a software RAID from Disk Management (you should go there, select one of the drives and choose New Striped Volume and include both drives). Both options will format your drives and delete everything from them so you should back up any data that you would like to keep, including the OS.

Captain_WD.