Switching from RAID 1 to RAID 0

[drmcninjaa]

Good afternoon,

I recently came upon a Optiplex 960 with two hard drives in RAID 1 configuration. Not thinking correctly, I installed Windows 7 (x64) onto the drive forgetting to switch to RAID level 0. Is there any possible way I can switch from RAID 1 to RAID 0 without reinstall? A reinstall is not out of the question, I will use Acronis to image my computer, reset the RAID level, and do it that way. However, I'd like to avoid the downtime of reimaging a computer and just switch RAID levels.


Write speed is more important to me than read speed, and I have redundant backups onto a few portable hard drives anyway. As such, RAID 1 is rather useless to me.


Thank you!

 

[vvhocare5]

Your best bet is to image the machine and migrate it to a RAID 0 array. If you just installed Win 7 there shouldnt be too much there. I have used EZGIG II and it migrates data quickly.

 

[geofelt]

Why do you want raid-0?
The performance benefits are much overhyped, and are limited to large sequential reads.
http://www.storagereview.com/php/cms/cms.php?loc=news_content&id=970&start=6&range=10

Since your raid-1 drives are identical, just reconfigure to non raid and use your second drive independently.
AHCI is a subset of raid, and would be the preferred sata mode(vs. IDE). It is not clear to me if your install included the AHCI drivers, and a reinstall may be needed if not. If you get boot problems, leave the settings to raid-1, but do not include either drive as part of the array.

 

[drmcninjaa]

Why do you want raid-0?
The performance benefits are much overhyped, and are limited to large sequential reads.
http://www.storagereview.com/php/cms/cms.php?loc=news_content&id=970&start=6&range=10

Since your raid-1 drives are identical, just reconfigure to non raid and use your second drive independently.
AHCI is a subset of raid, and would be the preferred sata mode(vs. IDE). It is not clear to me if your install included the AHCI drivers, and a reinstall may be needed if not. If you get boot problems, leave the settings to raid-1, but do not include either drive as part of the array.

Simply put without it I would only have about 350 gigs of space. Which isn't going to be enough in the long run. I do a lot of movie and music editing and, as you may know, this takes TONS of hard drive space.


I'm pretty sure I have AHCI in the bios, the computer is only around 9 months old. I'm mainly curious because it wouldn't seem like it would be very hard to remove the mirror and allow raid 0 directly.

 

[someone19]

There's no way to switch from mirrored to striped without destroying the mirrored array and creating a striped one. It just isn't possible.

Image the drive, reconfigure it and restore the image.

 

[geofelt]

Seems to me that you would still have the same total amount of space, just not in a single image.

If you put your source files on one drive, and the output on the other, I suspect your editing would go oven faster.
Try it and see.

 

[drmcninjaa]

Best answer selected by drmcninjaa.