How to Safely Remove Drive from Raid 1

Question

I have a Raid 1 mirror where one of the disk is showing S.M.A.R.T. events so I want to remove it while leaving the data on the other disk intact.

My machine windows 10 64 bit uses Intel Rapid Storage so I can access it with ctrl-I during POST. To be sure I don't delete data, can someone tell me the proper and safe actions to take to remove the RAID and then the faulty disk? I'll have to find a identical drive to repair it later but for now I just want to access the other disk's data as if there is just a single disk.

Thanks

Solution

The whole idea of a RAID 1 array is to have complete redundancy if a drive fails. This means, even if one drive is damaged beyond repair, the array keeps functioning normally on one drive.

So all you want to do is open your computer and unplug the failing drive, then boot your computer to make sure it was the correct drive. The system will boot and the RAID BIOS will mention that the drive is now in degraded mode.

Replace the drive for a new one (don't do anything like partitioning the drive) and plug it back into your system.

Enter the RAID BIOS and it will ask you if you want to rebuild the array. This will copy all data from the old functioning drive to the new installed drive.

Comments

[ChrisInEdmonton]

Why would you want to "remove the RAID"? Why wouldn't you just run it in degraded mode?

[robjw]

my machine is crawling because it is trying to rebuild the RAID - to the point of being not usable

[ChrisInEdmonton]

Right, so remove the failed drive. This doesn't explain why you want to remove the RAID altogether.