Can I Clone Standard Sata Drive to SSD in RAID 0?

I ordered a M17x with a standard 250GB drive and plan on removing it and swapping in 2 x OCZ Agility 2 OCZSSD2-2AGTE60G 2.5" 60GB SATA II MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD). Will I be able to put the SSDs in RAID 0 and then boot to Acronis or Hirens boot CD and clone it to the SSDs?

If this will not work does the M17x ship with recovery disks or can I just burn some?

 

My best guess would be that its not even worth cloning over since it probably wont mesh well going from one technology to another and I might as well just install from restore disks my only question then is would it create the recovery partition as well the Alienware Respawn or whatever.

 

Anyone try this?

 

These SSD appear to be one of the best anyone have one of these Samsung SSDs?

Newegg.com - SAMSUNG 470 Series MZ-5PA064/US 2.5" 64GB SATA II Internal Solid State Drive (SSD)

 

These SSD appear to be one of the best anyone have one of these Samsung SSDs?

Newegg.com - SAMSUNG 470 Series MZ-5PA064/US 2.5" 64GB SATA II Internal Solid State Drive (SSD)

 

You cannot copy over, I feel you may also loose you partition, but give it a go. Install your other drive, change RAID setting for your disks in the BIOS. enter the RADI setup then go to the recovery partion and load the OS

 

You do not want to clone especially if you want to maintain SSD performance due to alignment. Do a clean install it is a SSD it does not take long. It will take you longer to make an image and then lay the image down without messing up drive alignment and even then a good chance you will and ruin the speeds and performance of the SSD. You paid $2 per gig for a reason not to be lazy and reduce the speeds down.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/6732058-post4.html

Acronis True Image destroying alignment information? Useless for SSD / RAID use ? - Wilders Security Forums

A clean install will make sure you have 100% drive alignment and no performance loss. M17x already has an issue with SSD hitting max performance and by cloning you are only making it worse.

Some tweaks you can do and compare to my results to see how your cloning went.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/har...-intel-series-4-5-965-chipsets-jjb-tweak.html

 

The only way you can clone a single HDD to a RAID 0 SSD set is IF the BIOS were already set to RAID mode with the single HDD (which, you can do). If, on the other hand, the BIOS is set to AHCI, then unfortunately, if you image your HDD to the RAID 0 SSD, it will not boot.

Now, IF, the BIOS happens to be on RAID already, then the proper way to image (and maintain alignment for the SSD), is to do a new Windows 7 install on the SSD's, then, clone just the partition from the HDD to the OS partition on the SSD set. That way, the partition is still aligned (since Windows 7 creates a properly aligned partition) and all you are doing is cloning the old partition over the new one.

But, the path of least trouble is like Faiz said...start new, reload your stuff from scratch, and do it right.

 

Not sure what you mean the process I would go is this.

- Receive brand new M17x Laptop with OS on single HD
- Remove the single HD
- Install 2x SSD into M17x and set BIOS to RAID
- Boot to Hirens or Acronis CD and plug the single OS HD in VIA USB w/SATA adapter cable
- Clone the Single HD to the RAID drive that is now installed inside the M17x

 

^^^^^ good chance that will lead to ssd not being properly aligned and will cause performance drops in SSD since it will be using partition structure of the original drive which was initially setup for a HDD not SSD. The amount of time you will spend booting and cloning from a USB port to your HD will be just as long to do a clean install and guarantee drive integrity plus the benefits of clean installing and using the latest drivers. If you are trying to find the easy way out you are not. This task will take an 1 hour of your time but you will be using this install for many months to come so why not spend a little extra time to make sure you have the best install and no issues with drive performance.

I do a clean install like every other week and takes me about 20 minutes to install windows 7 off a external cd-rom drive. you can rip windows 7 to a flash drive to make it load in 10 min. Either way it does not take long to do something right instead of botching up your install along with your SSD.

If you have ruined your SSD partition or need to restore performance you will need to use secure erase and either hotswap the SSD in linux or use a desktop either way it will take a long time and might as well do it right the first time...faiz out

 

Does the M17x come with recovery disks that include the Alienware Respawn partition? When you say clean install of Windows 7 I am assuming this includes a recovery disk that comes with the computer and automatically partitions the drive with the recovery partition?

 

Oles Chiefs,

All I got was a drivers disk with software/driver and apps. + the Windows 7 Ultimate dvd. Thats it chiefs. Alien respawn I believe was a hidden partition only available on the R1.

Cheers.