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Question regarding moving HDDs to new mobo

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Hi, I've been pondering a new pc build, but several issues (inflating both time and cost) have hindered me.

Now, I have another question to refine my next build. Currently, I have 2x750GB raid 1 drives. As far as I understand, when I switch to a new mobo, these will have to be formatted and everything re-installed.

As such, I have a few questions;

1. Is there any way to avoid the scenario above (in general, not with that particular setup) and transition installed applications and data to a new PC? The only possible answer I could think of was that if the OS was on a dedicated HDD and the apps/data elsewhere. I doubt even that would help though

2. What benefits, beyond a speed boost, does a dedicated OS HDD or SSD provide? How large of one do I need for Win 7?

3. Also, since I doubt there is a satisfactory answer to (1); how do you, especially the gamers, transfer everything to a new PC? Is there a program, or just a long tedious day (or 3) of re-installing a TB+ of software?

Thanks

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If you move the HDD's to a Motherboard with an identical RAID controller then you wont have to reformat. So if you go from intel to intel that will work but it wont if you go from say Intel to NVIDIA RAID. You will have to reinstall the OS however.

1) There is no way to avoid a reinstall of OS and Applications.
2) There will be no performance increases having a dedicated OS drive including a speed boost. Bare minimum for WIN 7 would be 50 GB.
3) We re install the software after all updates and drivers are in place.

Keep all your "data" such as documents videos etc on a separate drive. The one issue with this is sometimes permissions have to restored which can be tedious. Make sure you keep the same user name on the new install or you can create a permission based nightmare.

1.) No way around instaling apps and os again. Clone doesn't always work even with identical systems and new hardware can cause really strange windows behavior if it boots at all.
2.) The benefit is if the drive fails for some reason or another, any data on the other drive is still safe. Pictures, photos, work documents etc. I've moved away from a single point of failure and mirror all important data on my OS drive to second drive.
3.) Install steam, select games you want to reinstall and let it do its thing, go to work, come back home and start playing.

Thanks for the info - that's what I thought the answers would be unfortunately.

I'm not planning on using it due to my volume of material, but does anyone have any experience using the Acronis (or its freeware equivalent) restore to new hardware feature? I would imagine this only works passably, & only then on computers with few applications & lots of data.
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