Remove one hard drive from raid 0 without losing data?

[tahayassen]

Here's the deal. I have two identical 500 GB hard drives running in RAID0, giving me a total of 1 TB of striped storage. Out of the 1 TB, I am using 160 GB. My brother is building a new rig, and he needs a new hard drive. In order to save money, I decided to give him one of my hard drives. Here's the question: I have 80 GB of data on each physical drive. Can I move all my data to one physical drive, and give him an empty physical drive so I don't have to go through the pain of backing up/reformatting/etc?

 

[Deleted member 217926]

No. You can back up the whole RAID array to another hard drive but there is no way to do what you are asking. Just like having a drive fail you have discovered one of the downsides of RAID 0.

 

[tahayassen]

Does the third drive have to be 1 TB too? Or 160 GB? Or can it be less than 160 GB? If I image the hard drive, is the image compressed?

 

[RetiredChief]

No workee either unless you are willing to settle for 2 x the smallest drive.. When you take two HDDs of different sizes and create raid0 the size will be 2 x the smallest drive so if you use a 160 GB + a 500 TB drive total array size wile be 320 Gigs. If that is workable you could do it - would prably use acronis true image.

 

[Deleted member 217926]

The 3rd drive can be any size as long as it's big enough for your data. You can use something like Acronis to just take an image of your drive and move it back to your primary drive. The image will not be compressed.

Personally I would back up your saved files, pictures, music ect. and do a clean install of Windows. A fresh install is always faster and does not have things like driver fragments and bad registry entries to slow it down.

I think you can do what you want with the free trial of Acronis but if not it's $50 for the retail version. WD and Seagate also offer tools to do this kind of thing.