Hi,
Read 50 million different articles around upgrading storage to SSD with just as many opinions!
So I thought I would post this on the Gigabyte forum, given I have Gigabyte gear and thought I would get a better response.
Keeping it real simple:
- I have a gigabyte Z68X-UD4-B3 with Bios F9
- The 2 x SATA 6Gb/s ports have two 1TB HDD drives in RAID 1
- The other 4 x SATA 3Gb/s ports have four 2TB HDD drives in RAID 10
What I am looking to do is:
- Replace the two 1TB drives (in RAID 1) with two Samsung EVO SSDs (in RAID 0) using the 2 x SATA 6Gb/s ports
- Don't want to do a reinstall Windows 8.1 and all the software etc, just do not have the time or inclination to do this
Thinking I will do a full disk image / restore using Acronis True Image 2014 rather than a cloning approach. Backup the current C: drive, remove the two HDDs and replace with the two SSDs. Then do an image restore. Current C: drive is nowhere near full and would easily fit on the RAID 0 SSD array.
Assuming all goes to plan I should then have C: drive running on the 2 RAID 0 SSDs. Hopefully Windows 8.1 does not spit the dummy regarding my licence key and I have to go through further pain in getting that to work.
Seems straight forward, but this often is never the case. Be interested in understanding any "gotchas" that I will need to address to make this process as smooth as possible.
Assuming I get the system to boot with the new RAID 0 SSDs, are there any post upgrade tasks that I need to do to optimise the new fast C: drive?
How do I go about doing over provisioning on the RAID 0 SSD array? I have another Samsung SSD for databases and I have used their Magician software to do the over provisioning on a single SSD not sure how to do this for a RAID 0 array of SSDs.
What stripe size should I set for the SSD RAID 0 array. The current C: drive really only has software etc, user files are on another drive.
I assume Acronis will handle the alignment question when restoring to the RAID 0 SSD array??
So please if you have any things that would be helpful for me to successfully migrate from a RAID 1 HDD array to a RAID 0 SSD array please let me know?
Thanks
Peter