Replace storage hdd with raid setup

[joeunderscoremorris]

I have a 2tb Seagate Barracuda HDD (NOT osdisk) that I want to replace with a ssd raid 0 setup. How would I move everything from the HDD to the Raid partition (including drive letter) and at the same time completely remove the HDD partition so all my programs or files would work properly and wouldn't be confused by the changing of drives? I'm thinking that this process would also involve a restart. Is there a program that would do this? Again, the HDD does NOT have my OS on it.

 

[Solandri]

There's almost no benefit to RAID 0 with SSDs, but lots of complications. Unless you're doing real-time video editing (one of the few tasks which benefit from SSDs in RAID 0), don't bother. Just go with a single SSD. Flip through the real-world benchmarks in the following review:

https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-raid-benchmark,3485-13.html

 

[joeunderscoremorris]

There's almost no benefit to RAID 0 with SSDs, but lots of complications. Unless you're doing real-time video editing (one of the few tasks which benefit from SSDs in RAID 0), don't bother. Just go with a single SSD. Flip through the real-world benchmarks in the following review:

https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-raid-benchmark,3485-13.html

Ok but how would I move everything to the raid setup?

 

[stdragon]

Acronis True Image 2018 will clone disks and resize partitions dynamically from source to destination drives.

Honestly, if it's just files, you don't even need to do that. Just create your new volume (single SSD or RAID), while leaving the old drive intact. Just format the new volume in NTFS, and copy all the data to it. Personally, I just use the ROBOCOPY command. But if you want to transfer them manually using Windows Explorer, you can do that too. After you're done, you can take out the original drive and re-assign the previous drive letter to the new volume.

 

[geofelt]

Raid-0 has been over hyped as a performance enhancer.
Sequential benchmarks do look wonderful, but the real world does not seem to deliver the indicated performance benefits for most
desktop users. The reason is, that sequential benchmarks are coded for maximum overlapped I/O rates.
It depends on reading a stripe of data simultaneously from each raid-0 member, and that is rarely what we do.
The OS does mostly small random reads and writes, so raid-0 is of little use there.
In fact, if your block of data were to be spanned on two drives, random times would be greater.
There are some apps that will benefit. They are characterized by reading large files in a sequential overlapped manner.

Here is a older study using ssd devices in raid-0.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-raid-benchmark,3485.html
Spoiler... no benefit at all.
And, your will reduce your exposure to drive or motherboard failures.

Changing to a ssd will bring you massive improvements.
If that ssd is a pcie based drive, more so.

If your new ssd is a Samsung ssd, use their ssd migration tool to move your current windows C drive and it's contents to the new ssd.
A very easy process.

 

[joeunderscoremorris]

Raid-0 has been over hyped as a performance enhancer.
Sequential benchmarks do look wonderful, but the real world does not seem to deliver the indicated performance benefits for most
desktop users. The reason is, that sequential benchmarks are coded for maximum overlapped I/O rates.
It depends on reading a stripe of data simultaneously from each raid-0 member, and that is rarely what we do.
The OS does mostly small random reads and writes, so raid-0 is of little use there.
In fact, if your block of data were to be spanned on two drives, random times would be greater.
There are some apps that will benefit. They are characterized by reading large files in a sequential overlapped manner.

Here is a older study using ssd devices in raid-0.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-raid-benchmark,3485.html
Spoiler... no benefit at all.
And, your will reduce your exposure to drive or motherboard failures.

Changing to a ssd will bring you massive improvements.
If that ssd is a pcie based drive, more so.

If your new ssd is a Samsung ssd, use their ssd migration tool to move your current windows C drive and it's contents to the new ssd.
A very easy process.

I'm not doing it for the performance, I'm doing it for the increased storage

 

[joeunderscoremorris]

Acronis True Image 2018 will clone disks and resize partitions dynamically from source to destination drives.

Honestly, if it's just files, you don't even need to do that. Just create your new volume (single SSD or RAID), while leaving the old drive intact. Just format the new volume in NTFS, and copy all the data to it. Personally, I just use the ROBOCOPY command. But if you want to transfer them manually using Windows Explorer, you can do that too. After you're done, you can take out the original drive and re-assign the previous drive letter to the new volume.

It's games and files. I've tried this type of thing before and when I moved stuff the registry wouldn't recognize it because of the different drive letter, and changing it didn't help either. Is there a free program that would do what Acronis True Image does?

 

[stdragon]

It's games and files. I've tried this type of thing before and when I moved stuff the registry wouldn't recognize it because of the different drive letter, and changing it didn't help either. Is there a free program that would do what Acronis True Image does?

I'm not aware of any free open source programs that clones data as easily as Acronis.

Look. There's nothing mysterious about drive letter or directories. So long as the relative path remains the same, it should be fine. For example if your current drive letter is F, then you would keep it F for the new volume. The directory structure should be exact as well.

"F:\Games\Stuff" (without quote) is just a path the program looks at. It doesn't differentiate between drive types or whether or not it's in RAID. It's a complete abstraction. What DOES matter is if you change the drive letter or directory structure. Also ACL permissions are important too, but by default it would be unrestricted anyways so that shouldn't even be an issue in your case.

 

[joeunderscoremorris]

It's games and files. I've tried this type of thing before and when I moved stuff the registry wouldn't recognize it because of the different drive letter, and changing it didn't help either. Is there a free program that would do what Acronis True Image does?

I'm not aware of any free open source programs that clones data as easily as Acronis.

Look. There's nothing mysterious about drive letter or directories. So long as the relative path remains the same, it should be fine. For example if your current drive letter is F, then you would keep it F for the new volume. The directory structure should be exact as well.

"F:\Games\Stuff" (without quote) is just a path the program looks at. It doesn't differentiate between drive types or whether or not it's in RAID. It's a complete abstraction. What DOES matter is if you change the drive letter or directory structure. Also ACL permissions are important too, but by default it would be unrestricted anyways so that shouldn't even be an issue in your case.

Alright thanks man

 

[Solandri]

I'm not doing it for the performance, I'm doing it for the increased storage

Don't bother with RAID then. Just create a Windows storage space.

https://www.windowscentral.com/how-use-storage-spaces-windows-10

A Simple storage space will glom a bunch of disks together as one. From then on, Windows (and any software you run on Windows) treats them as if they were a single physical drive. The advantage is that unlike RAID, which is tied to your hardware, if your computer's hardware should fail, you can recover your data by transferring the drives to any other Windows computer and recreating the storage space. When your RAID hardware fails, you have to find identical hardware to recreate the RAID array before you can recover your data.

The only gotcha that comes to mind is that disk management tools which require you to boot into a special boot environment (like an Acronis boot CD) will not be able to see them as a single drive (might be able to see the files as on separate drives - I haven't tried it). But RAID has the same problem so you're not losing anything.

 

[USAFRet]

I'm not doing it for the performance, I'm doing it for the increased storage

500GB + 500GB + RAID 0 = 1TB
500GB + 500GB + no RAID 0 = 1TB.

The only benefit you gain is a single drive letter for those drives, instead of 2 drive letters.
And you also gain the RAID 0 complexity and increased fail potential.


However you do it...RAID 0, Storage Spaces, individual drives...
Backup backup backup.

 

[stdragon]

@Solandri
DDF is pretty standard among all RAID vendors; both software (Intel RST) and hardware based controllers. I've imported/adopted foreign arrays with another controller before. It was easy. Essentially just getting the controller to mount and use it.

Of course, DDF wasn't always a thing, so in regards to late 90's tech, you're probably right.

https://www.snia.org/tech_activities/standards/curr_standards/ddf

"The Common RAID Disk Data Format specification defines a standard data structure describing how data is formatted across the disks in a RAID group. The Disk Data Format (DDF) structure allows a basic level of interoperability between different suppliers of RAID technology. The Common RAID DDF structure benefits storage users by enabling data-in-place migration among systems from different vendors."

 

[joeunderscoremorris]

I'm not doing it for the performance, I'm doing it for the increased storage

Don't bother with RAID then. Just create a Windows storage space.

https://www.windowscentral.com/how-use-storage-spaces-windows-10

A Simple storage space will glom a bunch of disks together as one. From then on, Windows (and any software you run on Windows) treats them as if they were a single physical drive. The advantage is that unlike RAID, which is tied to your hardware, if your computer's hardware should fail, you can recover your data by transferring the drives to any other Windows computer and recreating the storage space. When your RAID hardware fails, you have to find identical hardware to recreate the RAID array before you can recover your data.

The only gotcha that comes to mind is that disk management tools which require you to boot into a special boot environment (like an Acronis boot CD) will not be able to see them as a single drive (might be able to see the files as on separate drives - I haven't tried it). But RAID has the same problem so you're not losing anything.

So there's no benefit whatsoever for video games or anything else with RAID 0

 

[USAFRet]

So there's no benefit whatsoever for video games or anything else with RAID 0

With SSD's? No.
The use cases where it might be a benefit are few and far between.

RAID 0 performance does not stack with SSD's as it did with HDD's.
You just add complexity and fail modes.

 

[joeunderscoremorris]

So there's no benefit whatsoever for video games or anything else with RAID 0

With SSD's? No.
The use cases where it might be a benefit are few and far between.

RAID 0 performance does not stack with SSD's as it did with HDD's.
You just add complexity and fail modes.

OK thanks