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I am currently running the following setup:

-single sata western digital raptor hard with Windows 7 64 bit

Can I make a image with Acronis true image of my system. Then add another raptor drive with Raid 0. Then just install the image on the RAID 0 setup without reinstalling Windows 7?

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you sure will need to reinstall when your system-drive-on-raid-0 fails... – quack quixote Dec 31 '09 at 21:18
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up vote 1 down vote

As Steven says, with hardware RAID, you'd be fine, restoring to what seems to be a single disk to any OS you put on it. In your case, unless you have a good quality (expensive) RAID card, you will have software raid on the board, which is implemented as a driver in the OS, so you won't be able to image to it - you'll need a reinstall.

It's also worth mentioning that it's VERY risky running your OS from a RAID0, you're greatly increasing your chances of losing all the data. Make sure you've got good backups.

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Tacking on to that, use RAID1. You may not get the writing performance jump, but you'll definitely have the read performance increase. Not only that, you're also decreasing the chance of loosing your data! – Steven Lu Jan 1 '10 at 5:09
Eh, given some of the crappy onboard controllers you get, I wouldn't count on it, when you consider all of the extra processing will have to be done on your CPU, which will slow your machine down; and the fact the controller will probably bottleneck before the drives do. RAID just isn't worth doing without a proper card. – Dentrasi Jan 1 '10 at 10:51
plain old RAID 1 should be fine, it's just another write and a round-robin-ish read. you're right about RAID 0, though, and any hardware RAID may have issues if your controller fails and you try to migrate the RAID set to another controller. in general, software RAID 1 would be the way to go. – quack quixote Jan 1 '10 at 12:52
are you saying that hardware RAID 0 is riskier than a single drive (no RAID)? – sterz Jun 29 '11 at 5:32
@sterz: yes, because if either drive fails, you lose everything, so you're doubling your chances of data loss. – Dentrasi Jun 30 '11 at 13:31
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up vote 0 down vote

As long as Acronis has its own bootable disk and your RAID0 setup is hardware RAID, I don't see why you cannot do it unless Acronis specifically states that it cannot...

Reason for this is, as long as it is a Hardware RAID setup, the MB will make two disks into one format-able partition and the system would not have to be reconfigured (since it has already been told to be on one partition).

It's tricky, but if you're doing a backup, might as well do some trial and error (if you have the time).

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