Simple Raid Question

[DiabloMuerto]

So one of the HDD I got seems to be defective so going to have to RMA it, I currently have it in a raid 0 in my new build.  Just want to know, when taking it out, can I just unplug it (and the other drive in the Raid) and send it back or do I need to destroy the raid volume and everything before I disconnect it?  I have a seperate drive altogether as my OS drive so this won't effect any basic operations of the computer or anything I use this array for movies/games, stuff like that, so I wasn't planning on using the other drive until I got the new one back in to redo the raid set up.

Again, I just want to know if I should delete the raid 0 before disconnecting them?  If I don't will that cause any problems or anything with boot up or stuff like that?

[Aussie Allan]

 It should make no difference at all if you all ready have lost all the data on the drive...... for peace of mind you can go through the motions of deleting the raid set in BIOS if you still have access to it.... hope you had it all backed up.... this is why it's important to have a running backup plan running in the background on any and all raid sets

  Aussie Allan

[Dark Mantis]

RAID0 has it's benefits but it also has it's downfalls as you have found out. You really must make sure you keep a good backup regime going.

I would suggest removing the RAID cleanly more as a good housekeeping option than necessary. It always helps to keep things in order.

[DiabloMuerto]

Thanks for the replies.

Just to mention though this wasn't really a failure or inherent drawback of raid 0.  This is a brand new build and brand new drives, they were defective upon arrival.  I didn't have a backup but I didn't have any data on the drives aside from some basic programs.  It was however my intention to not run with a backup but after this I might go ahead and order an external drive for backup data.  Not so much b/c of losing anything valuable as I won't really keep anything beyond games/movies/music on the drive but just having to redownload all that stuff would be a pain so the backup would help me there.

[Dark Mantis]

Yes that would be a sensible idea as the RAID0 is more prone to failure simply because it uses two disks as one and so calls into question the integrity of both.