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I have a RAID 0 array with two 1TB hard drives. The RAID build came with the PC. I didn't set it up. Last week I started getting "Drive 1 at risk" message in the Intel Rapid Storage Technology software.

My question is, can I back up the data from the soon-to-fail hard disk (drive 1) into the other hard disk (Drive 0). That way all the data will be on the healthy drive, so that when the other drive fails I don't lose my data. I have sufficient space. Is there such software?

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What you want to do is simply replace the failing drive. By doing so you resolve two problems. The first is if the other drives starts to fail your hosed. The second the drive that is failing shouldn't be used ( unless you run it through SpinRite ). – Ramhound Feb 10 at 15:26
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@Ramhound, you can't "simply replace" the failing drive. Removing the failing drive will break the raid array, destroying all your data. – psusi Feb 10 at 15:48
Has anyone here cloned one drive of a failing raid 0 drive and swapped them successfully? – Moab Feb 11 at 2:29
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Basically, in a RAID0 every other chunk of data is written to a different member span (spans are single drives in this case). This means that half your data is on each drive as soon as it's written to your RAID.

You can't target data to be on only one drive or another, as the OS accesses the RAID as the 'drive'.

Back up everything to a 3rd drive (2TB to hold everything if the RAID is full) by using Windows Backup or alike, replace that failing drive, and restore.

If your data is <1TB in total, perhaps consider recreating the array as a RAID1 before restore.

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So Basically the only thing i can do is : – John Feb 10 at 13:35
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So Basically the only thing i can do is : 1_Backup everything. 2_Remove Faulty Drive and replace. 3_ Go into windows repair and do a system image recovery. Right ? Do the new drive that i get to replace the faulty one have to be the same Brand/ type as the old one? Also after everything will Raid 0 be affected, would i need to set anything for it to work properly again, or will it just work ? – John Feb 10 at 13:44
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The loss of a drive in RAID 0 is the loss of the Array. Adding a new drive will force you to recreate the array. As suggested I would use RAID 1 if you can fit your stuff on a 1TB volume. RAID 1 offers some fault tolerance. If this same situation occured with RAID 1 you could just swap in a new same sized drive and the array would then rebuild itself to a healthy state. – Paperlantern Feb 10 at 14:04
Ah Ok, now i understand. When i remove one drive and replace it. The laptop will boot to Raid setup in bios and i will get to create new raid there. Last question if i created the new raid as raid 1 and restored my backup, there won't be any problems right (since the backup was done on raid 0 and restore was done on raid 1) ? By same Logic, can't i just remove the faulty drive disable raid on the remaining healthy drive and restore ? – John Feb 10 at 14:41
@John Those are separate questions that should be posted as separate questions, once you run into an actual problem. :) – techie007 Feb 10 at 14:43
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