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I was recently given a Dell T7500, a server from a business, with two Xeon 2.0 processors, running XP (I have upgraded to 7), 4GB (upgraded to 32GB) RAM, and a RAID with four 1TB hard drives. I have since added a minimal graphics card (512MB) and a SB Audigy.

I really have no interest having a RAID, especially since I've already taken out one of the 1TB hard drives in the array and replaced it with a 250 GB SSD which is now C:.

Can I remove the RAID configuration or is there really no point in doing that even if I'm only going to use the SSD and one 1TB hard drive?

Here is a picture of the boot sequence that I can only assume sets up the RAID:

enter image description here

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  • So you have: 1 SSD HDD dedicated to C: and 4x1TB HDD configured as a RAID5 logical drive of around 3TB in size (as seen by windows "Disk Manager")? Is this true?
    – Damiano Verzulli
    Commented Sep 17, 2016 at 4:53
  • Pretty close. It came with four 1 TB drives and I replaced one with a SSD. There are still three 1TB drives. The 1 TB drive that I took out is now in another computer.
    – Tom K
    Commented Sep 17, 2016 at 13:16
  • I'm guessing that previously the C: partition was on the RAID array. When you did the upgrade, was it an in place upgrade? Or did you install fresh to the SSD.
    – Chip Shadd
    Commented Sep 17, 2016 at 14:42
  • As long as you have no interest in keeping whatever data is stored on the RAID array(s), fire away.
    – Daniel B
    Commented Sep 17, 2016 at 17:36
  • It was a fresh install of Windows 7 onto the SSD. No changes were made to the other HDs. One thing I don't understand is that the contents of the three terabyte drives are all in a blue font, while the SSD is the normal black. What does that mean?
    – Tom K
    Commented Sep 17, 2016 at 18:20

1 Answer 1

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Is it possible to remove RAID from a system?

Yes.

There's two ways to do RAID, through hardware or through the operating system.

Seeing things like "Adaptec" or "SAS" during the boot means you have hardware RAID. Typically, to change the configuration, you have to press a special key on boot to enter the RAID card's BIOS setup utility. On Adaptec devices this is Ctrl-A. I never worked with LSI devices but a quick google shows that Ctrl-C is the magic key to enter.

Note that any drive you modify the RAID configuration on will lose data and any existing OS install.

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