990fxa-ud3 Raid 1 on Win10 help

[racerty1]

Hey all i finally came around to the dark side and joined the OCs community,

I've got a question about a RAID1 array on my 990fxa-ud3 rev 4.0 board, im running windows 10 pro and i am currently setting up a Raid 1 via windows using two Seagate Barracuda 7200 1TB drives, i opted for doing it through windows because i didnt want to have to wipe my original drive (somewhere around 720GB worth of stuff, a lot of duplicates i need to chuck im sure)

Is there a better way to set this up without having to do a full wipe of my drives (atleast 1 of them) i know this board has RAID functionality built in, but i am unsure as to whether or not it is only optional for the boot drive, or if it can be done with 2 backup drives that are not on the MBR as a primary. ive read that using the onboard raid controller will allow for better speeds, but is one more reliable than the other and could i get it setup with the system as is now without having to do a full wipe on the drives and/or reinstalling windows?

 

[trents]

This is not exactly what you are trying to do but it may be helpful: http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/265977-32-boot-drive-raid-storage-setup

Here, this might be more on target:
http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/36504/how-to-create-a-software-raid-array-in-windows-7/

Is how to do it in Windows 7 but it may be very similar in Windows 10.

What you want to do is called "software" RAID. But I doubt you can set up any kind of RAID without wiping the disks. I think it is by nature a "destructive" process when it comes to existing data.

 

[racerty1]

Yes, that is technically what I have setup through windows now trents is a software mirrored Raid 1 setup.

To be more specific I guess I am asking is there a reason to choose hardware vs. Software raid, and if you can I set up a hardware raid via my board without having to have 2 blank drives ready.

 

[trents]

hardware RAID will add metadata to the drive and I don't think you can start with a drive that has other data on it.

 

[HankB]

Doesn't Windows let you create a degraded RAID1 with a single drive? I've done that several times in Linux. Create the degraded array with one drive, copy data from the other drive to the degraded array and then add the second drive to the array. I also do this to migrate to larger drives.