Need To Reinstall OS with RAID 5

[jacobshapiro]

I'd like to reinstall my OS (Win7) and keep all my data. Here is what I'm working with:

4x 320Gb Drives in RAID 5 which is where the OS is
2x 2Tb Drives in RAID 1 for storage

How do I do this? I've considered buying a 4Tb external drive and moving everything to that before I do the install just to make sure I don't lose anything, but I don't really need the external drive. The drives are almost completely full which restricts me from transferring all the data from the RAID 5 to the 2Tb drives.

Thanks.

 

[jacobshapiro]

Can I reset the RAID 1 back to non-raid and then use the extra 2TB of space to transfer to?

 

[ArisVer]

Can I reset the RAID 1 back to non-raid and then use the extra 2TB of space to transfer to?

No you cannot do that as far as I know.

The best thing you can do is to get an SSD. You will never go back to mechanical disks for the OS.

 

[jacobshapiro]

Perfect suggestion. What features should I be looking for in an SSD?

 

[Jovec]

Can I reset the RAID 1 back to non-raid and then use the extra 2TB of space to transfer to?

You could pull one of the 2TB disks from the RAID 1, it will run in a degraded mode and throw errors, but otherwise should be ok. Once you restore, you can add the disk back to the array and rebuild.

But RAID 5 on the OS partition just seems like a bad idea all around.

 

[jacobshapiro]

Can I ask why RAID 5 is a bad idea for the OS?