Will my software raid disappear if my OS drive fails?

[claytontheaggie]

I'm running Windows 8.1 on an old 320 GB hard drive I had lying around. I also have two 2TB drives, which I put into a mirrored RAID through the Windows disk utility. All my family photos and home movies are stored on the mirrored drives, and the old 320 GB drive doesn't have much more than the OS itself. The more I've thought about it, the more I've regretted not springing for a new drive for my operating system from the get-go. If my 320 GB drive was to fail, prompting me to reinstall Windows onto a new drive, would the new install of windows recognize my hard drive raid, or would I have to reformat them into raid again and possibly lose all my data? I've also considered swapping my old drive to a new one or an SSD before it fails, but again, I don't know what the raid, which was set up by Windows, would do in the event I had to reinstall on another drive.

 

[Mattios]

Upon research as long as you install the same OS it should detect the RAID configuration.

However hardware RAID is generally considered more reliable and therefore preferential over software.