Take the 2-minute tour ×

I have an old very usable Sony VAIO AR 590E.

It was getting a bit sluggish so I reinstalled the OS (vista) and I replaced both both hard drives with a single solid-state hard drive (Samsung). Have not seen a huge performance boost.

The original two hard drives were in RAID reconfiguration zero. I did not change this.

Two Questions:

Is it okay to have one hard drive in place even though I did not change the configuration?

Does this affect my performance?

share|improve this question
You have already changed it, as you removed the RAID completely. –  AthomSfere Sep 12 '13 at 2:33
how much RAM does it have? –  Keltari Sep 12 '13 at 4:05

1 Answer 1

If you were using 2 disks together in Raid0 configuration, the data is striped across both drive items. Removal of one of the drives would result in most of the data lost (except for that which fits under the stripe size)

The data from the 2 drives should be transfered out to a backup, while still configured the same way. Then the drive should be properly removed from the raid configuation in the raid bios, or software. Once that is completed the drive should be reformatted , and then could easily be used as a single drive.

You can leave most of these bioses set for raid (and still have one "spare" on there) or switch to AHCI, it is not known well that most of the raid settings were Raid&ACHI. My understanding of this is low because I am always set for Raid.

If the raid configuration was not raid0 then little of the above would apply.
Sometimes you have to be very carefull to make sure you remove the raid designations, like on most hardware, before returning a drive to single drive service, just depends.

share|improve this answer
Thanks for your comment, I originally put in the new hard drive and reinstalled the operating system. I never was able to change the raid configuration. I know it shipped in raid zero. Anyway, I disabled the AERO system on the vista and it works a lot better. I was just curious if the computer only had one hard drive in it whether automatically switched off the raid. –  Josh Sep 13 '13 at 15:58

Your Answer


