RAID 5 downgrade to RAID 0?

[silkares]

Ok, I'm officially an idiot.
I have an MSI GT70 2PC Dominator.
Was trying to play games on it, but my GPU gets overclocked within 5 minutes and overheats. Then, my soundcard, which is located right next to my GPU apparently, will overheat as well as start crackling before finally just ceasing to work until everything cools down.
I, being the genius that I am, decided I would mess around with my system settings after seeing the SUPER RAID 2 optional logo next to my keyboard.

I have 2 SSD's that make up my C:/ Drive and these were previously in a RAID 0 format. I also have a HDD 1TB which I put a lot of data on.
Guess what, I formatted it into RAID 5. I lost all the data. I accept it. I spent the whole day learning about RAID and finally pulled the HDD off through the BIOS. Now, the Intel Rapid Storage gives me notifications that the RAID is degraded.

I reformatted the HDD, and can use it now. I haven't solved my initial problem- probably can only do that by buying an external sound card or popping my computer open and cleaning the fan/ adding thermal paste, all of which I have no idea how to do.

My questions...
1) Leaving my current laptop config like this- dangerous?
2) How do I reset it to RAID 0? I don't care if I have to reformat the whole computer.

The issue is I don't have my Windows 10 disk or any other disk to recover my computer, for that matter.

3) I tried to partition the HDD into another 240 GB drive (larger than 236 just to be sure) and add that to the RAID 5, but no dice. So I am sure I want to revert it to RAID 0. Is this something I do through BIOS? Change it from RAID to AHCI? Then reset the SSD's?

This has been a New year's nightmare for me... Hope someone can help. I'm unable to send the computer in for servicing as it is out of warranty, I am very poor after buying gifts for christmas and birthdays, and I am still in college.

 

[Someone Somewhere]

RAID has very little advantage for most people. Personally, I'd set it back to AHCI, reformat everything, and just treat it as separate disks.

You can get new Win10 disks here: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/home

90% probability the heatsinks/fan is full of dust. Ten minutes on youtube should get you a video of how to fix that.

Replacing thermal paste is not something I'd recommend doing, generally. Somewhat harder and more risky, and unlikely to actually fix anything.

 

[silkares]

RAID has very little advantage for most people. Personally, I'd set it back to AHCI, reformat everything, and just treat it as separate disks.

You can get new Win10 disks here: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/home

90% probability the heatsinks/fan is full of dust. Ten minutes on youtube should get you a video of how to fix that.

Replacing thermal paste is not something I'd recommend doing, generally. Somewhat harder and more risky, and unlikely to actually fix anything.

Thanks for your quick reply.
It was never in AHCI. So I would be doing something new - my drive might not even boot. Don't really dare to do that unless I know what would happen. And i'm definitely not considering buying a new copy of windows 10. My computer came with 8/8.1 and I upgraded free, and then got another free Education upgrade.

My product key is probably under my battery, and I can also generate one using CMD prompt IIRC...
I'm gonna attempt to take my computer apart to get dust out of the fan tomorrow, but the drive issue remains... So losing sleep over this.

I guess to add further...
What does changing to AHCI do?
Logically, if I do something to the SSD's that my OS is currently running on, how would it still function?
How would my computer still be able to boot up etc. and run windows if those SSD's have been formatted?

Possible for me to migrate the OS to my HDD, reformat SSD's, and then migrate back for better performance? How do I do this if it is possible? Many thanks.

 

[Someone Somewhere]

You can download the install disks for 7, 8.1, or 10 free from that link. If you upgraded to 10, it'll notice that the first time you install it; just skip all the prompts for a product key and it'll activate once you're connected to the net.

AHCI is the standard, non-RAID way of accessing a SATA drive.

If your drive is currently actually in some kind of RAID array, it won't boot or even be accessible when you switch to AHCI. Fresh install needed, then restore from backups.

Possible for me to migrate the OS to my HDD, reformat SSD's, and then migrate back for better performance? How do I do this if it is possible? Many thanks.

Sounds like a recipe for much pain. I really really really wouldn't recommend it. You won't get any real performance gains, you run a substantial risk of something not working and losing data (you do have backups, right? If not, do it now before anything else), and there's likely to be niggling issues like 4K alignment that utterly screw up your performance and cause issues down the track next time you upgrade windows.