Cloning Non-boot disk

[K0nvikT001]

Okay, here a pretty simple enough but complicated question, but q quick history first.

 

I have Three Separate storage disks, one SSD and HDD that came with the computer when i bough it, and a third HDD i added to increase disk space. Now the SSD is only 128GB capacity and thats where windows is installed on, but thats not the drive in question. My E: disk (because D: is DVD - drive) is where i keep games files and other important files and then my F: is just a dumb for files. I wanna clone some (not all) of the contents on my on E: drive, mainly programmes and videogames and my steam directory to the RAID SSD setup i am planing on getting that will be Striped, (because  I am planning on purchasing two 512GB or 1TB (or somewhere between)). 

 

is there a way i clone the HDD to an SSD RAID without windows completely losing its shit? I wanna keep the directory as is, all the files being where they are right, just on a RAID.

[Altecice]

If you only have your steam game library and personal files on your HDD you can literally drag and drop it onto the SSD array. If you have programs installed, they will need to be uninstalled and reinstalled on the new drive as they cant be moved.

[K0nvikT001]

2 hours ago, Altecice said:

If you only have your steam game library and personal files on your HDD you can literally drag and drop it onto the SSD array. If you have programs installed, they will need to be uninstalled and reinstalled on the new drive as they cant be moved.

thats what i wanna avoid becuase non critical system application and other apps are installed on there, like GTA and FSX and CoD and Origin with all its games (i dont use origin often so there is no need for it to go to SSD)

[Altecice]

3 hours ago, K0nvikT001 said:

thats what i wanna avoid becuase non critical system application and other apps are installed on there, like GTA and FSX and CoD and Origin with all its games (i dont use origin often so there is no need for it to go to SSD)

The only possible way to move installed programs to a new location is to do a proper sector by sector full clone to the SSD array and you dont want to do that (else you will loose windows). So the only option you have is to reinstall the programs in the new location

[K0nvikT001]

 DAS SOME OLD B.S THAT I CANT CLONE HARD DISK... WINDOWS WONT KNOW, IT WILL MAINTAIN THE SAME DAMN DIRECORY NAME... I DONT WANNA HAVE TO SIT FOR ANOTHER 5 DAYS DOWNLOADING GTA 5 ONTO THE SSD. FUQ DAT SHIT!!!

 

[Captain_WD]

5 hours ago, K0nvikT001 said:

~snip~

Hi there

 

As @Altecice pointed out, moving installed applications from a partition to a partition is dangerous and requires a sector by sector copy/paste which will most probably damage the file system on your C drive which on it side will cause your system to crash without the option to recover it properly. 

 

Now, you mentioned you were getting new drives for the OS and you plan on placing them in a RAID array and have the OS on them. It is highly recommended to do a fresh install of the OS when doing this instead of cloning your old SSD on the new array which will create a new system registry and your games and applications will need to be reinstalled anyway due to it. 

Furthermore, games don't really rely on the storage's performance for anything but the loading times and you won't see any changes in the FPS nor in the graphics from having them on a faster storage drive. 

Also, RAID0 (Striped array) boosts the performance mostly on the sequential speeds and has little effect on the random read/write speeds which again means it will have little effect on gaming applications. 

 

I'd suggest to have the new array installed, do a fresh OS installation on it, see which games have longer loading times and either install them on the RAID or keep your old SSD for such purposes and leave everything else on the HDD, if you plan to keep it. 

 

Captain_WD.