How To Remove Raid 0

Hey Guys,
Going to be ordering my MSI GT680R this week and was just wondering, if I wanted to remove the Raid 0 setup and just have normal drives how would I go about doing this?

Is it just a case of going into the bios and turning it off or am I being nieve in thinking this and it is a lot harder?

I mean I might leave it on I guess it depends on what you guys say, I've been told that it decreases the life of your disks by quite a lot and the performance benifit isn't really noticable unless you are doing something like encoding large videos?

 

First thing you could do is ask your reseller to configure it so that it's in normal mode, and not RAID.

Otherwise, it's just a matter of turning it to normal in BIOS. Just note that you'll have to reinstall from scratch if you do this.

 

well I could leave it in raid 0 I guess, I just thought that it decreased the hd life cycle a lot

 

You would need to set your SATA operation to a non-RAID (AHCI or IDE mode) and reinstall your operating system.

 

with Win7 you could also use backup and restore to create a image. you would first need to shrink the partition below the size of a single disc. once you have create the smaller than single dik image to an external drive you then could go to bios and disable the raid into ahci and then restore the image from the external drive. this would prevent os reinstall.

If however as you mention it is a new system OS reinstall is the least complicated and problematic. just be sure all disks are good before you disable the raid to ahci..............

 

would you guys put it back to 2x sata or leave it as raid 0

 

I don't like Raid 0 in consumer products. It is an additional variable that can cause many problems. And when a Raid 0 has trouble it is often impossible to recover the lost data.

I don't think it makes drives fail faster. It might be that people who have Raid 0 tent to want more performance so they might push their hardware harder. Disable spin down and frequently benchmarking. Also they might frequently upgrade drivers, and firmwares or even use beta drivers that cause additional problems and this might make it look like drives are failing more often.

 

If you don't want to do constant backups I would just disable RAID and reinstall the OS.

 

RAID0 doesn't decrease the life of a drive at all. You just have extra risk, if one of the drives fail you lose all of your data. I run RAID0 on all my desktops for the OS and programs. Keep everything important on a different array/hd.

 

RAID0 doesn't decrease an individual drive's life at all. What it does is double your chance of failure over a single drive (if one drive has a 5% chance of failure, you're at a 10% chance your array will die because either drive could die). It also makes failures pretty much impossible to recover from, worse than a single drive which as long as it's spinning can often recover a little bit of data.

 

Well to be honest the only thing I'll be using the laptop for is coursework and gaming, so dataloss isn't really a problem as ill Just make sure I have a few backup copys of my work on a usb stick. Thanks for your help guys