I want to add an SSD to an older HP desktop with two 500 GB mechanical drives in RAID 0

[Hokie]

I have 7 year old HP desktop. It has two 500 GB mechanical drives in a RAID 0, 1 terabyte configuration. I just did an SSD upgrade with a Samsung 500 GB SSD on my laptop and it worked very well. I cloned the existing mechanical drive to the SSD using a USB cable and then replaced the mechanical drive with the cloned SSD. This worked very well. It cut my boot time way down and everything runs faster.

Now I want to do the same on an HP desktop. I have about 250 GB used counting the OS, programs and data. The new SSD is a 500 GB so it will hold what I have now. I want to keep the existing mechanical drives for data. It dawned on me that this might not be as simple to do as I thought. What I plan to do is install the SSD and hook it up to a spare SATA port (not where the RAID drives are connected). I will clone the RAID 0 C: drive using the Samsung cloning software. Then I will remove or disconnect the existing mechanical drives and reboot. I might have to change the boot order in the BIOS settings.

Here is where I am stumped. I am thinking I might reformat the existing mechanical drives on another PC and plug them back into the desktop. Can I keep the RAID 0 setting and use these drives for data? I have a sinking feeling that this might not work and that the PC still might try to boot from the RAID drives when they are installed. I suppose I can turn off RAID in the BIOS and just install them as single 500 GB drives? Has anyone tried anything like this?

[California_Republic]

1. You could

Just buy an external hard drive case and plug it into the USB

[Hokie]

2. I have one of those already

I would much rather use one or both the existing hard drives as an internal SATA drive. They will be faster and more reliable that way.

[eppur_se_muova]

3. I would think boot order in the BIOS would take care of it. nt

though not a Windows expert (assuming yours is a Windows system -- Windows users most often fail to mention that)

[Hokie]

4. Good point, yes Windows 10

It was a Windows 7 machine originally and I upgraded to Windows 10 during the free upgrade period. I am just wondering if I should turn RAID off in the BIOS when I reboot with the SSD.

[Hokie]

6. I finished everything up today

Last edited Tue Feb 5, 2019, 11:07 PM - Edit history (1)

I have the SSD installed as the boot drive and my old RAID array as a data drive. I wiped the RAID 0 drive and reconfigured it as a RAID 1 array for better reliability. I used Macrium Reflect software for imaging the drives and restoring them as needed. The SSD boots much quicker and runs applications faster too.

[Hokie]

5. Yes, I was able to do that

I received the SSD today. I cloned my existing RAID 0 C: drive to it using the Samsung software and a USB to SATA cable. After the clone I installed the SSD and connected it to an open SATA port. I booted to BIOS and changed the HDD boot order to make the SSD boot first. This worked and I booted to Windows. I reformatted by mechanical drives so I could use them for data. The RAID configuration was maintained.