Need assistance with undoing my RAID 0 setup

[Brett636]

So I have two WD Velociraptor drives in a RAID 0 setup, and recently had some BSOD problems that I have been working on in the Crashes and Bugs section of this forum. It has been concluded that my RAID is probably my issue and it was suggested that I reset my RAID controller, but if that is going to cause me to lose my data then I am not opposed to getting rid of the RAID setup anyways since I get little benefit from it other than some minor drive performance gains. Will going back to running each drive separately cause any unforseen problems with Windows if I am able to reformat and start from scratch? If so what is the best way to do it?

My Motherboard is a Asus M4A89TD Pro/USB3 and I am using its onboard RAID controller currently.

 

[DeaconFrost]

If you tried breaking the array, you would lose all of your data on both drives, so have it backed up first. Then, you can go into the BIOS/controller and turn off RAID, making them just individual drives...probably by setting your controller to AHCI, or IDE if not available. Once this is done, you can follow our guide here in Tutorials for a clean install, using DISKPART to clean the drives and install Windows 7.

If it was me, I'd consider selling one or both Raptors, and putting that money towards an larger storage drive, or an SSD. RAID0 was great in theory and hype, but never really yielded actual boosts in normal usage, so you won't be missing out by soing away with it.

 

[Brett636]

I was thinking in the near future getting an SSD drive as my main and using one of the raptors for storage. They are 600GB each so one is more than sufficient. I had two of them obviously for the RAID 0 benefit, but going away from that makes one of the two somewhat pointless, but I guess you can't have enough storage space right?

 

[DeaconFrost]

They are big for Raptors, yes. I was picturing the 150 GB variety for some reason. You could eventually sell both for a nice chunk of change, and get an SSD and maybe a 2 TB drive for storage. But, either way, going to an SSD for your system volume will give you much more than even Raptors in a RAID array could achieve in theory.

 

[Brett636]

I went into the bios and set the drives for ACHI, put in my disk and its telling me it can't find a partition to install too. What do I do now?

The exact wording is "setup was unable to create a new partition or locate an existing system partition. See setup log files for more information."

 

[Brett636]

Figured it out, had to unplug one of the drives