SSD RAID 1 and Clone Software

[Mysteerie]

I am planning on getting 2 Samsung EVO 850 drives and running them on a 3ware RAID card in RAID 1.

My purpose for the RAID 1 is simply hardware redundancy. So I can just swap a failing drive with another drive and continue with my day without restoring from a backup or older clone of a drive.

I am doing my research but thought I would ask here as well. Would there be any bad issues with this setup? e.g. do I have to worry about TRIM, wear and tear? Performance degradation?

Also, what are you guys recommandations for clone software? Also, can I clone an HDD to an SSD and just swap out the HDD with the SSD without any issues in Windows 7?

 

[WyomingKnott]

Two answers. One, you have to look at the manufacturer's site and see if TRIM works in RAID1. You really don't want to run SSDs without TRIM. It's going to depend on their driver and hardware.

Two, a direct sector-to-sector clone may run but will be sub-optimal and may wear the heck out of your SSDs. Moving to SSD requires adjusting the alignment and, unless your HDD was being run in AHCI mode, tweaking the OS to expect AHCI or, in this case, RAID mode.

Several software packages at reasonable prices will either clone with adjustment or do a full backup and then restore with adjustment. I prefer the latter process myself, because I love having backups. Acronis True Image is well-known for working well, but there are probably a dozen good products. You may have an issue needing to install a RAID driver specific to the card - I don't know.