Hello to all,

I'm petty inexperienced when it coms to working with RAID and hope you'll be able to give me useful advices.

I have Dell Precision T5500 workstations that has option to set up RAID on HDDs during boot (POST). I have done this couple of times and procedure is the following:
1. During POST I press Crl+I
2. In the Intel rapid Storage ROM integrface I chose option 1. Create RAID
3. Chose HDDS which will build RAID1, and chose type of RAID
4. Exit IRST RO
5. Install Windows, programs....


The problem with this approach is that any data on both drives will be deleted.

Currently, I have Dell Workstation with two drives, but they are not configured in RAID. Other disk is SATA 1 and it is connected on the Motherboard and seen during POST but it is uninitialized.

I don't want to use IRST ROM configurator, because I'm afraid that I'll lose data and systtem on HDD SATA 0.

What would be the best approach?
Can I just install IRST on windows (7 64 bit)and then just add second drive as RAID 1?

What can you recommend?

Thank you!

the best thing for a boost of the pc is to buy a ssd ...then you clone the hd1 onto the ssd and then you can create a raid 0 with the two old hds....

https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/wha...ations.2434197/
http://www.portables.org/smartblog/1_tes...-t5500-ssd.html

Thank you for your replies. This computer is used for some business purpose and high end performance and boot time are not that important. So I wouldn't go for an option to built in additional SSD drive.

A for the possibility of making the system non bootable with probably BSOD, I'm going to skip that option too. I was fighting BSOD boot for more than a week and with Dell computer it is not easy to win.
bootrec /fixmbr and fixboot as well as rebuildbcd won't probably solve the the problem. So I will probably used this second HDD as a spare and from time to time clone my OS HDD with clonezilla or something similar.