How to Upgrade Non-Boot Drive in Vista

I have a Dell Dimension 9200 running Vista Home Premium 32. I currently have a pair of 500G SATA drives in a RAID 1 mirror using the Intel Matrix pseudo-RAID. I bought 2 2TB drives to increase my storage and I would like to replace the existing drives with the new drives in the same RAID 1 configuration. Right now I have all of my data on this RAID array (i.e., all user folders, My Docs, etc. are on this drive; OS and program files are on a different drive).

What is the best (and cheapest) way to do this? I basically want to seamlessly substitute the new pair of drives for the old ones.

Can I clone the drive using dd and a Linux boot CD, and then expand the partition? Do I need to break apart the RAID first before doing a clone operation? I think I still have 1 free SATA port on the motherboard.

Or could I pull out one of the old 500G drives and replace it with a new 2TB drive and let the RAID rebuild the array? Then I could pull out the other 500G drive, replacing it with the other 2TB drive, and rebuild the array again. And then extend the partitions? Would that even work?

Hi Newbs,

Welcome to the board,

You can simply set up the two 2Tbs in to what ever DAID you like and then mirror the original to it with True Image (this is the one I am familiar with and it works). Don't forget any RAID would show up as one drive; so treat it as one drive. Good luck and let us know how it turns out.

Bruce

I can't set the new drives up in a RAID until after I get rid of the old drives. I only have 1 free SATA port right now.

Is there any free alternative to True Image? $50 is a little steep for my wallet for this 1-time usage. Is dd under Linux not a good option?

Last, is there anything special I need to do after I clone the drive to get it to seamlessly replace the old drives? Is it just a matter of mapping it to the same drive letter? Right now, all of the user directories are automatically generated on what is my "E:" drive (the 500G RAID drives). I don't want to break that when I swap in the new drives.

As an aside, why is it this hard to upgrade a hard drive under Windows? It seems like a fairly common thing to want to be able to do. I wish there were a built-in utility to do this.

I found the answer to my question on Intel's website:

Intel® Rapid Storage Technology — How do I move my RAID 1 volume to larger hard drives?

Basically, you can do what I suggested and just pull out one of the RAID drives and replace it with a larger one and let the RAID system rebuild the data. I'll give it a whirl and see if it works.