Add a SSD RAID 1 array to a Asus M4A78T-E w/RAID 0?

Hello all

This may get a bit complicated and I will admit this is not something I might be talking all about correctly so please be kind if I get some of it wrong (also please feel free to educate).

So currently I have a Asus M4A78T-E motherboard, and in using its onboard RAID controller and for the OS drive, I have a set of Western Digital ATA Black drives in RAID 0 which for this boards controller means it striping across each disk, which I did years ago for the best performance at the time.

Now I would like to install a set of SSD drives and put them in RAID 1 which for this board is a Mirror RAID.

Basically while I know this board as all its systems are older will not allow the max performance of the SSD drives still I think it will be better than the ATA RAID 0 even in RAID1 (I hope). So if that works out to be the case I think I can go to Mirror RAID as I really would like to get the redundancy of that while not loosing the performance of the RAID 0 I have now.

Also I should mention that these Black drives have been in for years and have a lot of miles on them are starting to show signs that are starting to go so I am getting a bit worried about that, plus with all that time too the OS really could use a clean install.

So if this can all work this way mechanically my desire is to put a clean version of my OS on the SSD drives, and then as desire hopefully swap in the BIOS which one is the boot drive. Then as I have time swap the key files over to which as a point ultimately I will have the SSD RAID 1 array be my main OS drive.

Thanks greatly for any help.

Thats exactly what I am looking for.

When I did the drives in RAID 0 years ago I was looking for the most I could get from the drives performance wise, but I always worried about what would happen if one ever failed as I would loose everything.

But now that just like you said, the SSD drives will be faster then even the ATA's working in RAID 0, then why not get one.

But since too I have the equipment to do this, why not get two for the redundancy as it is a lot easier then having to do back ups all the time.

As mentioned too, these are going to be my OS drives, so they really don't have to be big.

So now that SSD drives around 500g are in a nice price range, just seems like a good simple way to increase my performance for this part of a pretty old machine that I can't do much more to, all while at the same time giving the the reliability of a continual real time back up of the OS drive.

There is nothing wrong with using RAID 1, if it is used for the right reasons. The purpose of RAID 1 is to maintain access to your files in the event of a drive failure and permitting replacement to be deferred to a more convenient time. This is a big deal for a busy server but it is often difficult to justify the cost in a workstation. RAID 1 provides the storage capacity of a single drive with no significant performance improvement. But it's purpose is not to protect your data. For that you need to maintain backups. For an OS drive image backups are best. But no form of RAID ever devised is a viable backup solution. There are many ways other than drive failure to loose data and RAID provides no protection from any of them.

Don't even consider RAID 0 without backups. If one drive fails you loose everything, and as you have 2 of them that is twice as likely to happen. Data recovery from a RAID 0 array is often challenging, even for a data recovery professional.

I have a small SSD (128G) for windows and programs and two 500G HDD's on a RAID 0 array for data. I have the speed of the SSD and the space of the HDD's at a low price.
I also have a 1T HDD that is always power disconnected. It has Win 7 and maintenance programs. Once a week I boot from it and do a data backup from the two 500G HDD's on a RAID 0 array. For the SSD I have a disk image.

In this way, even if the computer (SSD+ RAID 0) is infected by virus or malware, I can boot from the backup, work and use all my data files.