Pairing two 840 EVO SSDs in a RAID 0 - questions

AleksaSavic3

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Feb 17, 2015
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As the title says, I have one Samsung 840 EVO 120 GB SSD and it works well, but it is always full. I thought about buying a second SSD to pair in RAID 0, and I have some questions regarding this process.

1. I need to backup all data from the SSD and copy them back later. Is there any software that can do this?

2. Will this work? 😀 I am doing this because of bigger capacity, not speed(although higher speeds are nice).

3. Can I pair 850 EVO with 840 EVO? They have almost the same price and I heard that 850 EVO is more durable.

4. TRIM support in Windows 7. Does it exist, can I manually trim my SSD(s) and is it necessary? I do not want to upgrade to Windows 8/10.

My motherboard is MSI Z87-G41.
 
Solution
1) Clonezilla, along with many other cloning software programs are out there. Some free (clonezilla is free). You do have the right idea. Clone the boot drive to a secondary disk, create the raid array (which will destroy all data), then copy it back to the newly created raid array.

2) It will work. You will need to probably do some partition adjusting after the system is back up and running as when you clone the 120gb drive, it will be a 120gb 'item'. When you create the new array (240gb), then copy the 120gb back, it will create a 120gb partition, with the remainder as unused space. It's trivial though to expand it back out these days through windows.

3) You can pair anything with anything, the only point being they should be...
a much more sensible option / solution is to simply move your large content (like your Downloads folder, or your media files) to another drive, and set up a symbolic link so that the OS silently follows it as if it was on the SSD itself.
 
I have already done that and I also moved a lot of files to other HDDs, including the Users folder. There is Windows and Android SDK installed on it. I do not understand what is taking so much space and I haven't found what is it, yet. That is why I want to expand it somehow.
 
1) Clonezilla, along with many other cloning software programs are out there. Some free (clonezilla is free). You do have the right idea. Clone the boot drive to a secondary disk, create the raid array (which will destroy all data), then copy it back to the newly created raid array.

2) It will work. You will need to probably do some partition adjusting after the system is back up and running as when you clone the 120gb drive, it will be a 120gb 'item'. When you create the new array (240gb), then copy the 120gb back, it will create a 120gb partition, with the remainder as unused space. It's trivial though to expand it back out these days through windows.

3) You can pair anything with anything, the only point being they should be the same size, otherwise you'll lose space. ie: if you pair a 256gb with a 128GB the raid array will be twice the size of the SMALLEST drive.

4) Trim support does exist in windows natively, HOWEVER in a raid array you can run into issues with trim support. At this point, if you're using an Intel 7/8/9 series chipset, the Intel RST drivers should enable trim support even in RAID 0.
 
Solution