Migrate Win 8.1 installation to RAID0

Discussion in 'Windows 8' started by PLANTROON, Mar 15, 2014.

  1. PLANTROON

    PLANTROON MDL Novice

    Nov 28, 2012
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    #1 PLANTROON, Mar 15, 2014
    Last edited: Mar 15, 2014
    Hello
    I'm unsure if I'm posting this in the right section
    I have good knowledge about computers in general, I consider myself a highly experienced user. I got this raid0 idea when my friend brought me a netbook with 15 GB ...wannabe-ssd... I laughed a lot! It suffers from really bad disk performance and I was thinking about using an sd card to speed it up - this wouldn't be a problem on Linux, but the owner of the PC wants Windows 7 on it. Any idea on whether or not it would be possible ?

    Background
    My Win 8 was installed on a 320 GB harddrive (disk0) along with Archlinux. I got an old 80 GB harddrive (disk1) for free today. Right now, I only have pagefile on it and I have as well moved my Archlinux installation to expand Win 8 on my disk0. The bootloader (syslinux) is on a USB flash not to break Windows 8's superfast boot experience :D

    I can't reinstall Windows 8 as I don't have access to the activation key (no it's not a pirated version, no KMS stuff, it's not even a VL). That's why I want to migrate to a raid0 array with the two disks. I am aware of only having 160 GB volume.(number-of-disks times the size of the smallest disk in the array)

    Questions:
    How do I take the whole C:\ drive where I have Windows 8 installed and move/clone it to the raid0 array ?
    No matter if it's a hardware or a software raid - my BIOS supports this but I don't want to waste the (320-80)GB of space - when using software raid, I noticed that I could still use the remaining storage - this will be used for Archlinux.

    Will I be able to use the unasigned part of disk0 (320GB) in case of using hardware raid?

    I have a pretty slow CPU - Athlon BE2350 overclocked to 2.5 GHz - will raid negatively affect performance ?

    Sidenotes:
    I prefer using apps / software that are available on Windows. I'd like to avoid using shareware and other such programs for doing this.