I'm looking at upgrading a laptop with MSI super raid 3 , the system uses a special intel raid card that support 4 m.2 drives and currently had 2 128gb dries in raid 0 but what Im looking to do is either add another drive but leave it out of the raid, or break the raid and have all the drives independently. Does anyone know if this is at all possible or am i screwed.
4 x m.2 drives? fancy....
It works really well but since its a raid card id assume you could just not strip the drives together and run them apart.
i would reference the instruction manual or the laptops support page for that. ive never messed with raid but i have the options. sounds like a driver/software fix. check your laptops driver web site to see if they have software to change this.
in most cases created raids are just hot swaps. im assuming they did that for upgrading purposes. i have the same on my thinkpad but have never messed with it.
I did look in book and online and came up with almost nothing, i cant even find anything on other people messing with it.
You'll probably want to image the drive to somewhere else before you start messing with it. I've had raid cards pick up a new drive as a foreign config and wipe the whole thing.
Usually you'll need to disable fast boot in uefi, enter the raid controller settings menu (usually the next screen after post). And then create a single logical device out of the new single physical device.
Adding a new drive to a raid 0 without reimaging the array is not possible.
If you add a drive there's no problem and you can use it separately. If you want to have 3 separate drives you have to break it apart and a total format is surely needed (even if you want to add drives to a RAID config o any kind) as @reikoshea rightfully said. Always do a backup image of your system if you care about it before doing anything on it.
What I really wanted to do is leave the raid alone and just add another drive by its self for a linux drive