75ZT Community

I have a couple of SSD's in Raid. I know, I know, I read the information after I did it, but to be fair they've been in Raid for about 3 years and only just showing signs of speed degradation. So the time has come to clean up the drives resetting them back to factory and re-installing the OS. This time however they will be mounted as separate drives with Windows 7 on one as is now and hopefully the other with Windows 8 and operating them as dual boot, or just sticking the drive in something else.

Now deleting the array isn't a problem, I can do that, but I have an another array handled on the same software on the motherboard and then another array on different hardware but still controlled by the motherboard. If I re-install Windows do I need to setup the raid first during installation? I remember in XP that you use to have to install Raid drivers first but I can't remember if that was just for the drives the OS was going on. I have a fair amount of important stuff on the drives which at present I can't backup to a secondary source as I don't have the facility and an online backup would take years (think TB in the double figures).

If I did a straight forward install without installing the raid drivers would I compromise the array's through the OS? They are handled by the motherboard so I'm thinking no, but some clarification is most definitely needed! I don't fancy windows telling me I need to initialize the drives or something post install!

Many Thanks

I have a raid array on my desktop, as the secondary drive. It's striped for speed.

So I did a backup of the data to an external drive expecting to have trouble when I upgraded to a new motherboard and so on, since the raid drivers have to match the motherboard.

Having done that, I put in the new motherboard expecting win7 to recognise the pair as separate drives, but somehow it knew they were a raid array, and left them as configured. No separate driver loaded.

Doesn't help a lot but win 7 can cope with some arrays without extra drivers.

Windows 7 did recognise the array when I installed them but I did install the "proper" manufacturers driver afterwards to keep things updated. I'm guessing I'll have to bite the bullet and do it or wait before I can afford some backup space, which could be well... anything up to 12 months! I have the same motherboard/hardware in my setup just a re-install of the OS so maybe I'll get lucky...

Cheers Duncan

Well I've risked it! I backed up as much as I could and separated the drives. It has deleted the 2nd raid configuration but not erased the data so I'm hoping that when I reset the raid for the 2nd configuration it restores it fine. If not there hasn't been too much of a loss.

I've started restoring Win7 to the single SSD but there doesn't seem much in the way of performance increase, despite secure erasing the drive. Intel tools still gives 100% efficiency on the drive though and they are still way faster than a standard 7200 HDD. I'm probably too damn picky!