putting an ssd and a hard drive in raid wouldnt make a difference, you have to make sure your motherboard can support the speed of an ssd anyway,. i have 2 vertex 3 in raid 0 and had to change motherboards to be able to get the full speeds from the drives.



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I think we may just be able to back it up using my laptop, then format it. Probably better that way even if it takes a while to transfer files, and I'm not sure about the whole deleting Windows files manually thing.

I have another question though. Could I make a 60GB partition on the HDD, and do a RAID 0 with that and a 60GB SSD? Would the performance actually be boosted, even though the HDD is slower?



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first off, you just manually delete the windows folder in the old HDD. you should be allowed to do this as long as none of the files are in use, and since youll have a new windows install on the SDD / RAID0 HDDs, the old files should not be in use.

on the first attempt, it may not allow you to delete all the old windows files, might be left with ~20mb or something. or maybe itll allow you to delete them all, cant remember, i havent done it in so long. point is, if youre left with some files you cant figure out how to delete - and it shouldnt be much - you can always compress the folder via windows to have it leave an even smaller footprint in your HDD while you figure out how to properly kill them.

then theres all the files your old windows partition threw around. you know, user files - downloads saved by default under 'my documents' - and the like. for these youll have to manually hunt around the HDD and delete them. isnt too hard or time consuming.

then theres other crap like the registry. even if you have the old windows folder totally deleted, when you go to boot windows a window will pop up identifying multiple OSes, asking you which to choose to boot. cant quite remember how to get around that, but i know you can access some settings via msconfig under 'boot' to delete some info and make booting faster. google is probably your friend here.

if im making this sound too complicated or messy, it really isnt. just some good old fashioned manual searching and deletion is what youll have to do. even if youre lazy and dont come close to deleting everything, youll still gain the vast amount of GBs back.

and of course, you can always straight up format the drive. maybe copy literally everything but the windows folder to a cloud / online storage place (maybe you can find a trial offer?), format, and recopy.

anyway, go for it! hope any of this helps.



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^oops misread your OP a bit regarding RAID0.

RAID0 would be the most economical solution regarding capacity, but a SSD would trump it in raw performance, esp for everyday use due to their super low access time.

both have a bit of reliability concerns though as you probably know. if one drive fails in RAID0, its near impossible to recover the data people say. then SSDs dont have the best reliability figures.

both, in practical terms, can be called reliable. id just be sure to back up any very important files to something external.



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Okay, I currently have a drive with Windows already on it, as well as a bunch of files I want to keep. Say I buy an SSD and install Windows on that. Will the SSD be able to see the files on the other HDD even though it also has Windows on it? Also, is there anyway to "delete" Windows on the HDD to free up space, while keeping the other files?

I was thinking of either doing that or a RAID 0 for my friend's PC. When he told me he needed more space, I was telling him how he could speed it up and still maintain all the space with RAID. I figured reinstalling Windows on an SSD instead could be a better option though, because I don't think he needs that much more space, plus it would speed up boot times and OS files. What do you guys think?



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