Cloning current SSD w/ OS to 2 New SSD's in RAID 0

BaileyCakes, welcome to these user forums.

Please see KB document: 56634: Acronis True Image: Cloning Disks which documents the restrictions for using cloning, this states clearly that you cannot clone dymanic disks which I understand will include disks in a RAID array configuration.

What you can do which should work provided that your two new SSDs in their RAID configuration present to Acronis as though they are a single drive, is to take a full disk backup of your current Samsung SSD (making sure to include all hidden partitions) and restore this backup to your installed RAID SSD's using the Acronis bootable Rescue Media.

There are several caveats that you must observe:

1.  The Acronis bootable Rescue Media must be booted in the same boot mode as used by your Windows 10 OS, i.e. if Windows boots via the EFI bootloader, then the rescue media must do the same.  See webpage: Check if your PC uses UEFI or BIOS to check the boot method.

2.  You should confirm that the Rescue Media when booted can see all the drives involved in the restore operation, i.e. your installed RAID SSD set and the external USB backup drive holding the backup file from the original Samsung SSD that will be used for the restore.

See also KB document: 1540: Difference between Backup and Disk Clone which describes the differences between using Backup / Recovery and Cloning, and also has video tutorials for each of these methods.

Hi Steve

Thanks for the help. I realy appreciate it.

I just thought of something, would it be easier if I just bought another Samsung SSD(same model as the one being used for my OS currently) instead of using 2 new SSD's??

Or is there more to it than just buying another SSD and plugging it in??

If you are just wanting to get more drive space by moving to a larger SSD and don't want / need to additional drive security provided by a RAID configuration, then replacing your 120GB SSD with a larger one would be a straight-forward task.

The process is essentially the same as I outlined previously:

Make a full backup of your current OS SSD drive as a matter of good practise and to give a fallback position!

If cloning:  then test the Acronis bootable Rescue media works OK and can see your drives.

Remove the current 120GB SSD drive and replace it with the new larger SSD drive.

Connect the removed 120GB SSD drive via USB or a spare SATA connector.

Boot the Rescue Media and perform the Clone from the 120GB SSD to the new installed SSD.

When finished, remove the 120GB SSD before attempting to boot into Windows.

You can also do a Backup & Restore to achieve the same migration.

I meant if I buy another Samsung SSD and configure it in RAID 0 with the exisitng one that is currently being used, not to replace the exisitng SSD with a new one thats similar...

I didnt know if that would save me time and make things easier by plugging in another SSD..or will I need to reinstall/clone the OS anyway no matter which way I do it..

My goal is to speed up the PC a little by running it in RAID 0

If thats not an easier solution I will start with your first post to me and try to install the 2 new SSD's that way..

Since modern SSD drives can almost fully saturate the existing SATA interface I see no advantage in creating an SSD RAID 0 array as there will be no performance increase as a result of doing so.

Published read/write numbers for SSD's are mostly in 500+MBps range, SATA III maximum bandwidth which is not fully attainable is 600MBps.  Even entry level SSD's these days quote speeds well above 500MBps.  Any gain that could possible be achieved by an SSD RAID 0 configuration is simply not worth the effort.

As Steve mentions bootable recovery media would not be able to recognize your new RAID 0 array without adjustment.  You would need to create a WinPE recovery media and then inject the appropriate RAID drivers in order to get things working.  On a modern day UEFI booted PC the UEFI firmware must support RAID boot which currently is only possible using Intel RST drivers and your bios firmware must support it so your PC must have an Intel storage controller on board or you are out of luck. 

All in all at the end of the day you are looking at a huge amount of effort and very little if any gain.

I didnt know that i would not see a big increase... That makes a big differnce in my decision.

I guess I will skip this and leave the Computer as is...

Thank you guys I appreciate your advice.

would a PCI SSD make more sense and give better performance??

If so, is there anything i should look for in a PCI SSD?

Yes and yes.

PCIE NVME SSD's are up to 5 times faster than SATA SSD's.  These are m.2 form factor (which is also a form factor of SATA so don't be fooled by the new look - it needs to say NVME and not AHCI or something else if you want the speed boost.)

However, not all systems can boot from NVME drives and some OS don't support it natively either.  1st, check with your bios manufactuer and make sure it supports NVME PCIE hard drives for BOOTING.  If it does, then what OS are you using?  If you have anything less than windows 8.1, you would need to inject drivers into your restored image to make it bootable so Universal Restore would be requierd.  You can cheat though, by first installing the NVME drive as a secondary storage device and installing the drivers in Windows ahead of your backup and restore process.

There aren't a lot of options for NVME PCIE hard drives.  The best and fastest is the Samsung 950 Pro, nothing beats it.  The 256GB model is about 1500Mbps read and 900Mbps write (max).  The 512GB model is like 2200 READ / 1800 Write.    A close second is the Toshiba OCZ r400 NVME pcie hard drive.  Both of these models are awesome and are of the commercial kind so they have public drivers.

You can also find OEM NVME PCIE hard drives on Amazon and eBay like the Samsung 951 (be careful, there are two kinds SM951 and PM951 - you want SM951 as the PM model is slower - https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/samsung-ssd-pm951-vs-sm951.2461768/).  The problem withe OEM drives is getting drivers injected since they are not publicly available.  However, others have reported using the Intel NVME driver just fine and/or substituting the 950Pro driver for the 951.  You also don't get warranty support for OEM versions like you do for the commercial versions.

Last, because of the M.2 form factor, if your motherboard doesn't have an m.2 slot that supports NVME PCIE (again, not the same as SATA - although some boards can use the same slots for both), you would need an adatper like this one and a free PCI-E gen 3 slot running 4x to take full advantage of the drive's capability.

Last, if your board does have a built in slot already, keep in mind that it may disable other ports as a result - consult your manual.   

**UPDATE - one other final note, to boot from an NVME hard drive, your OS must be UEFI installed.  Acronis should allow you to convert an MBR OS to UEFI though (in most cases).  

i spoke with the motherboard manufacturer and they said i can boot from the pci, assuming i changed a coupole of settings, enabling CSM....and using UEFI.....

i was looking at this one on newegg http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820228165&cm_re=pci_ssd-_-20-228-165-_-Product

I guess I will give it a try.  

Thanks everyone !

Looks like a winner.  For $60 more you can double to 256GB (which is quite a bit better deal for price per GB).  One thing to keep in mind with all SSD's is they start to run like crud when they hit the 20% or less mark for available space.  Having some extra space on an SSD, even with a slim/well-groomed OS, may be the night and day difference for performance.  I'm assuming you'd have about 110Gb useable space on the 128Gb version... you'd want to block off about 20Gb (over-provisioning) to ensure you never get below that 20% threshold... which leaves you with about 90Gb to use.  Consider how Windows 10 "upgrades" itself and needs twice the amount of space available to do this as well.  If you can afford the 256GB one, that would be my recommendation, but cost is usually the deciding factor if the budget is stressed. 

Cool, Thanks again!

Bailey,

Your performance experience with the use of PCIe connected storage drives will vary depending on how the drive is used.   For example, you will not see a huge increase in boot or application load times with these drives.  There will be an increase in performance but that increase can be marginal at best.

It all depends on the file sizes which the drive is handling as to the performance of the drive.  Small file sizes are the most difiicult to process and take the most time whereas large files can be handled much more effectively.  If you perform video editing you will see a significant performance increase with use of these drives in that task because video files are large in size.  In everyday computing however you will not see big gains in performance because most of those processes are with small file sizes.

I personally have 2 machines running these drives.  Both use such drives as boot devices.  One of them uses a single M.2 form factor drive of 256GB in capacity as the boot disk.  Machine boot for this PC is 8 to 9 seconds with Windows and startup application loading taking another 20 seconds on average.  The other PC uses two M.2 form factor drives in a raid 0 array for the boot device.  Machine boot is 7 to 8 seconds and Windows and application loading takes another 15 seconds on average. 

Benchmark tests run on these machines show that sequential data read/write on the raid 0 device vs. the single drive to be more than doubled but real world performance does not support those findings. 

Having said the above I will say that I love the performance of these 2 machines and I really enjoying using both.  So if you are inclined to go this route I would say certainly do.  You will not be disappointed in the results bearing in mind the factors that effect performance as pointed out above.