Can I break raid1 on Intel controller and keep data?
 

I had 2 hard drives in raid 1, some old 72gig raptors.

About 6 months ago 1 of the drives started "crashing" and needed to be rebuilt a lot until it finally is no longer working.

I have been running the computer with just the 1 drive on sata port 0 and now it?s starting to act up also.

I bought a new drive 500gb 7200rpm.

1. Can I added this drive on sata port 1 and mirror my info even though it?s a totally different drive? (I?m guessing yes)

2. Can I then remove the bad raptor and move the 500gb to sata port 0 and then change the Intel raid utility to use non raid without losing data? I need the extra sata port for another data drive I have.

1) Yes you can mirror it to a different size drive, but it will only be 72GB ...so you may have to create a 2nd partition with the remaining space on the 500GB drive.
2) Hmm ...not positive on this because ..I would say that you can't do that. I'm googling trying to find an answer...

You'd be better off cloning the data from the old drive to the new. Most software can also expand partitions/file systems so you'll have a 500GB rather than 72GB file system on the new drive.

You can break a raid and keep data. You should be able to boot the machine w/ 1 drive only. Best bet is to do that, backup/grab all your data, and create a new raid set with new drives

Well I already did it and it worked!

First I added the 500gb and it mirrored the drive(took about 30min)

Then I removed the bad drive and rebooted to make sure everything was fine.

Then I reverted the raid to normal and it said my data would be lost but it remained intact.

Booted up and noticed I only have a 72gig drive but I went to the disk management and was able to expand the drive to full size.

I think next time I get a new drive I will just raid them and mirror then unraid, seems pretty simple.