During the installation of the system I did not notice that the system was set to IDE mode and installed Windows 8 (64bit), now upgraded to Windows 8.1. Unfortunately, the process to covert to RAID mode is not documented and I really do not want to reinstall the system from scratch. Many will argue, why not go to AHCI and just do software mirroring. That conversion is better documented, but people appear to have many issues depending on their configuration. I have never really trusted Microsoft RAID-1 mirroring, but am willing to give it a try if people feel that is the best approach. I am old school, never trust a hard drive, even SSDs without mirroring.
Questions:
Option 1:
Is there a procedure for Windows 8/8.1 for the Gigabyte/Marvell IDE to RAID conversion without having to reinstall the OS?
Will I take a performance hit converting to RAID-1 from IDE? The system boots and allows me to open my browser in like 20 seconds today.
Do I need to install the Marvell RAID driver?
Option 2:
Should I convert to AHCI, use the SafeMode method to allow Windows to make the registry changes, and then use MS software mirroring? If so, what is the expected performance hit? Do I need to install the Marvell AHCI driver?
Is the Marvell controller a dumb RAID-1 mirroring, i.e. does it allow parallel reads from both drives to improve performance? With 16GB of memory on my system, it might not matter.
Option 3:
Get a 240GB SSD, reinstall Windows 8.1 and start over with AHCI and use mirroring of the data drives?
Option 4:
Just use the secondary drive as a backup drive and leave things alone?
