upgrade to SSD on Z68X-UD4-B3 motherboard

[pebuilder]

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

[autotech]

to restore from image you have to use a hard drive that is larger than your hard drive now no matter if only a small part is being used.
You will have to reinstall windows for the raid 0 no way around it.
SSD's are overprovisioned from factory usually.
If you use acronis that gets you away from the size factor but still you are changing raid from 1 to 0 so a fresh install will have to be done.
If you have to overprovision manually then 6 gigs is usually enough for each ssd.

Now you can build your raid 0 array and then try acronis  but I don't think it will work. If it does you wil see a performance decrease.

[pebuilder]

Thanks for your response.  I have one question though...given the current RAID 1 volume is set up at the hardware level.  Surely Windows would have no idea that it is a RAID 1 volume.  Would it not just see a single logical volume, given the hardware is looking after the RAID functionality.

So if I shrink C: to fit on the equivalent RAID 0 logical space would not a restore work ok.  No different from when I migrated from a single HDD to the current RAID volume.

Not sure why you are saying this would not work and I would get a performance hit.

[autotech]

I don't think you will be able to shrink c enough you can try and see what it will let you shrink it to.

If you already had bios set right then as long as you don't have to delete a volume  or build it then that may help you. Deleting or creating the volume always takes all info off of it which you know as when u build a volume it always ask are you sure all information on this drive will be lost.

So put  the 2 SSD's in build a raid 0 volume and use arconis to image it. That pretty much explains what you want to do. What I want you to do is tell me how good it works actually. No harm in trying it that I can see if it doesn't work you still have the raid1 to boot up of and try something else.

What I might actually do is make the raid 0 and load windows onto it with proper driver then while in windows tell it to import all the info from the raid 1 volumes using acronis that might actually work better in a way.