Question Migrating to ssd (raid 0) from larger drive

[Gilligan8]

Ok, so I cloned the drive with a easeus bootable cd. All seemed to go well but it would not boot from the new drive.

A little bcd editing and I had a boot menu that would boot off the "e drive".

Problem is that everything (programs and such) still have shortcuts to the "c drive".

If I remove the original drive it boots but says "preparing your desktop" and comes up to a "broken" desktop that doesn't really load anything and nothing works but task manager and ctrl-alt-delete.

I THINK that if I were to change the "e drive" to be the "c drive" then it wouldn't probably work.

I'm just nervous about changing because the only way I can manipulate that is by booting off the original drive and changing the c drive to something else first. I imagine if it doesn't work I'll have a tough time getting it back together.

What am I missing?

 

[k1114]

You can't change the letter of c drive. It looks like something went wrong in the cloning process so you may need to do that over. I know you tried removing the original but it's good practice to always remove it for the first boot to a clone so you know it works by itself. It sounds like you didn't if you had a boot menu.

I've never cloned to a raid 0 so that could also cause some issues.

 

[Gilligan8]

I've tried twice.

I did remove imediately and it wouldn't boot... I then added it back and it would boot to original drive.

That is why I messed with boot menu.

 

[geofelt]

What did you hope to accomplish with raid-0?

Your performance will be worse and you have caused yourself no end of problems.
Get your windows C drive on one ssd and use the other independently.

If your purpose was to have a single larger C drive, I think you can accomplish that within windows.

 

[k1114]

I'm assuming since he specifically states cloning from a larger drive that raid 0 was used to have a larger "drive" to clone to. I think raid is just screwing it up.

 

[USAFRet]

You can't just change the drive letter of the OS drive. Before, during, or after a clone operation.
The "new" proposed OS drive ending up with the E drive letter means that you did not finish the clone operation properly. You still booted up from the old thing.

At the end of the cloning process, thte very first thing you must do is to power OFF, disconnect the old drive, and allow the system to try to boot up from the new drive by itself.


What drives are involved here, before and after? Size/make/model, please.

 

[Gilligan8]

Raid 0 = faster ... Yes, there is double risk of failure, but I'm ok with that idea... my important data doesn't live there and I can afford to be down if it happens.
This article confirms what I'm saying: https://www.pcworld.com/article/2365767/feed-your-greed-for-speed-by-installing-ssds-in-raid-0.html


In EASEUS dashboard everything had drive letters and when I booted it could not find the boot sectors properly.

I'm going from a 1TB to 240GB so I am limited in what I can use to clone as I'm having to resize partition at the same time.

 

[USAFRet]

And this shows the opposite:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-raid-benchmark,3485.html

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/samsung-950-pro-256gb-raid-report,4449.html

For cloning, you just have to reduce the size of the actual data. Not the partition.

 

[Gilligan8]

For cloning, you just have to reduce the size of the actual data. Not the partition.

With what programs?

Everything I read about Clonzilla and Ghost4Linux said that couldn't be done.

 

[Gilligan8]

Also in regards to single drive vs raid 0 performance gains.

I imagine those articles are absolutely spot on if you have the latest badass hardware... I'm running some fairly boring M500 and Agility 3's (2.5" mediocre drives) not the latest M.2's or anything like that.

I have a box of these sitting around.

 

[Solandri]

The first Toms Hardware article on SSD RAID-0 is from 2013, using slow 128 GB SATA SSDs from the same generation as your M500 and Agility 3.

The slowdown with RAID-0 is due to the overhead of the RAID software. RAID-0 will speed things up with sequential reads and writes. But for reading/writing small files (which are the slowest operation on all SSDs and HDDs and thus contribute most to wait time), it provides no benefit. If you're writing a 4k file, RAID-0 splits it up into two 2k chunks. Then writes one to each drive. Except the smallest file size on a modern drive is 4k. So RAID-0 ends up turning the single 4k write into two simultaneous 4k writes, meaning zero speed benefit. And when you add in the overhead of RAID, it ends up being slower than a single drive.

The problem is more pronounced with SSDs because their read/write operation is so quick, the RAID overhead becomes a significant percentage of the time spent on the operation. So it'll affect your mundane SATA SSDs the same as it would an M.2 NVMe SSD since 4k read/write speeds haven't increased appreciably.

How exactly did you clone the HDD to SSDs in RAID-0? Unless you've got a dedicated RAID card, I didn't think that was possible (yes I've tried it). Most of the built-in RAID on motherboards is actually fakeRAID. They're a simple bootstrap to allow you to boot off the RAID array, but the RAID encoding/decoding itself is handled via software drivers loaded with the OS. If you boot off a cloning CD, it doesn't have that RAID software so shouldn't have been able to write to the RAID array. Are you sure you actually cloned to the SSDs in RAID, and not to a single drive?

 

[Gilligan8]

HP Z230... the "motherboard raid".

It sees the drive as 220 gigs in the cloning software.

I can essentially boot it just not fully (still points to C:/Program files)... it definitely runs faster when on the SSD so I know it's running it... plus under task manager explorer.exe and such are pointing at e:/blahblah blah

 

[USAFRet]

With what programs?

Everything I read about Clonzilla and Ghost4Linux said that couldn't be done.

The newer cloning/imaging tools only count the actual consumed data space.
Macrium Reflect (this is what I use daily), Casper, EaseUS Todo...

But yes, with CloneZilla, the actual partition sizes counted. It was great several years ago, but its fallen by the wayside in favor of better functionality.

 

[Gilligan8]

The newer cloning/imaging tools only count the actual consumed data space.
Macrium Reflect (this is what I use daily), Casper, EaseUS Todo...

But yes, with CloneZilla, the actual partition sizes counted. It was great several years ago, but its fallen by the wayside in favor of better functionality.

I used EaseUS, but maybe it was an older version as it didn't take or didn't "clone" properly it seems from whatever one is saying.

 

[USAFRet]

I'm not sure about going from single drive to RAID 0, or RAID 0 to RAID 0.
But basic cloning procedures:

-----------------------------
Specific steps for a successful clone operation:
-----------------------------
Verify the actual used space on the current drive is significantly below the size of the new SSD
Download and install Macrium Reflect (or Samsung Data Migration, if a Samsung SSD)
Power off
Disconnect ALL drives except the current C and the new SSD
Power up
Run the Macrium Reflect (or Samsung Data Migration)
Select ALL the partitions on the existing C drive
Click the 'Clone' button
Wait until it is done
When it finishes, power off
Disconnect ALL drives except for the new SSD
This is to allow the system to try to boot from ONLY the SSD
Swap the SATA cables around so that the new drive is connected to the same SATA port as the old drive
Power up, and verify the BIOS boot order
If good, continue the power up

It should boot from the new drive, just like the old drive.
Maybe reboot a time or two, just to make sure.

If it works, and it should, all is good.

Later, reconnect the old drive and wipe all partitions on it.
This will probably require the commandline diskpart function, and the clean command.

Ask questions if anything is unclear.
-----------------------------

Personally, I would not bother with the RAID 0 thing. At all.

 

[TJ Hooker]

Raid 0 = faster ... Yes, there is double risk of failure, but I'm ok with that idea... my important data doesn't live there and I can afford to be down if it happens.
This article confirms what I'm saying: https://www.pcworld.com/article/2365767/feed-your-greed-for-speed-by-installing-ssds-in-raid-0.html

Do you spend a lot of time opening/saving 10GB files, or copy/pasting 10GB files to/from the same drive? I'm just curious what aspect of your daily computer use you expect this to noticeably speed up.

 

[Gilligan8]

Do you spend a lot of time opening/saving 10GB files, or copy/pasting 10GB files to/from the same drive? I'm just curious what aspect of your daily computer use you expect this to noticeably speed up.

Illustrator and Photoshop day in and day out.

 

[USAFRet]

Illustrator and Photoshop day in and day out.

The added complexity delivers sub 1% differences.

https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-raid-benchmark,3485-11.html
"Our third real-world benchmark provides us with pretty much the same results as the first two. There’s practically no difference between the SSD-based setups, whether you're looking at a single drive or two in RAID 0. In this one, we're booting Widows 8, starting Adobe Photoshop CS6, and loading a picture."

 

[TJ Hooker]

If you're frequently loading/saving very high def, uncompressed (and therefore presumably large file size) images, I could see that maybe being noticeably benefitted by RAID 0. But I'm not sure how realistic it is to be working with images of that sort of size. Do you find yourself often waiting for non negligible amounts of time for a file to open or save?