Convert from raid to ahci

[Silent454]

So a bit of a mess I've gotten myself into and trying to get out of. I initially setup my system with the raid on my motherboard for raid 5 between my 3 5tb HDD and using a 500gb ssd as my boot drive. Well after having set this up I've discovered some less than savory consequences and wish to convert the whole thing to an ahci base and keep the hdds on a Windows software raid instead. I've already tried creating a system image and converting it manually then restoring but no such luck. BTW using Windows 10. Any help would be appreciated. I also have an external drive capable of storing all my data.

 

[JaredDM]

Well, it goes without saying that since RAID 5 is a stripe array you'll have to copy all data off and back onto the array. There's no easy conversion method to do anything like what you're suggesting. Also, just FYI RAID mode should still support AHCI, so I can't imagine what benefit you'd think there is to doing a software RAID. Software RAID is always slower than hardware.

 

[Silent454]

Well it's not a true hardware raid, it's based in firmware and I found some people who benchmarked it and found the performance was much the same while increasing cpu load to use the firmware raid as opposed to software. But my main concern is losing the array if the mobo goes out. As I understand it windows should just adopt the array regardless of the back end if I convert to software instead of raid. Also s.m.a.r.t. support supposedly doesn't work in this mode and it might allow me easier transition to nvme if/when that happens.

Also something I read said that raid 5 arrays over a certain size are doomed to fail when rebuilding after a failed drive, negating the benefits.

Basically I am just trying to set myself up for the fewest headaches in the future while maximizing performance in the meantime.