Bought another 970 Evo Plus 1TB during Amazon Prime. If it arrives, I will set them up in RAID 0 from BIOS. Now, I don't feel like reinstalling Windows and set everything up again. Will I encounter problems if I try to restore a system image created from a single drive to a RAID volume? I think it shouldn't make a difference. But have searched a bit about it and there's some conflicting reports. I will be using the built in Windows System Image tool to backup and restore the image over the network. Unless another tool is needed (Acronis, etc). Anyone managed to successfully restore a system image from a single drive to RAID?
It depends on the raid chip. Tbh. I haven't tried it on actual hardware, the last platform I can tell is X79/C600 on Intel. There it was only possible if the backup software supported Intel RAID controllers, as they have a different DEVICE ID than running in AHCI mode. Easy way to try: run Windows setup. If setup cannot find your raid until you load a separate driver, you'll have problems with recovering. The effort to try (and possibly fail) is so high, I would reinstall Windows and call it a day. P.S.: just my personal opinion as a network and system administrator is: Raid0 is called Raid0 because there is ZERO chance to get your data back if sh!t happens. You are multiplying the chance of failure in a Raid0 setup. 2 drives = double chance of failure, 3 drives = triple, ... and so on. If you need performance, go either 10, 5 or 6, as you got some redundancy with that. Just a friendly tip.
Most probably I would have to load the Intel RAID driver during restore setup. I already saved it on the Windows installation drive. I found this. I think I would have to change those registry keys values to 0 for Windows to successfully boot. Thanks for the warning but I don't care about losing the data. I even have my server in RAID 0 so I am not going to worry about the PC. The stuff that I care about ,I have a backup, the rest is not important and can be all redownloaded. The perk of having a high speed connection nowadays.
Running server in Raid0? I smell a candidate for the BOFH inner circle. (Just a joke, do as you like. )
Received the SSD on Tuesday. Yesterday saved the system image and installed the drive. This morning tried the restore and.... it went much smoother than I expected. When the restore finished, it restarted and Windows started to boot. It took some time but failed and restarted on its own and tried to boot again. It restarted again and went into automatic repair mode and tried to do the startup repair. It couldn't fix it. But then I just booted into safe mode as that thread suggested and it worked! Restarted again and boot up normally. Everything was fine until I noticed that it was only showing the 1TB in file explorer. It made sense though since it was a re-image of that. I went into disk management, just 1 disk was displaying, which is good, with 1TB of unallocated space at the end. I just extended the current partition with that available space and now it's the full 2TB.
