Win 10 Expand Boot Partition via RAID rebuild

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OK, my system used to be Win 7 with a maximum Boot partition of 500G.  I have two WD Red SATA drives in the system operating in a RAID 1 volume.  Last year I finally (for a number of reasons) rebuilt the system with Windows 10.  So I’m no longer limited to a 500G boot volume.

What I’d like to do is this:  Replace each of the two 500G SATA drives with a 2T SSD SATA drive.  I figure if I replace one at a time, when the first one goes in the RAID (based on the motherboard) should rebuild a 500Gb partition on the new SSD drive.  Then I replace the second drive with a new SSD drive, and let the RAID rebuild proceed apace.

Once both SSD drives are up and running, I should be able to use any of the readily available partition editing tools (I happen to have a licensed copy of Disk Genius) to expand the boot partition from 500G to 2TB.

This should give me the speed of SSD without having to go through the agony of backing up the boot partition to other media and then praying that my restore goes without glitches.

Am I dreaming, or will this work as I have envisioned it?

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I think you are dreaming, unfortunately.

Your RAID controller wont thank you for putting an SSD and HDD together due to the speed difference, and it will rebuild the SSD as a 500GB disk that may or may not be expandable.

I’d take the old disks out and put the new disks in, then boot into the BIOS and set up the RAID. Boot from your recovery USB and restore.
The main advantage is you can easily swap the old disks back in if it goes pear shaped – record the cable positions.

You need to make sure you can boot to your recovery environment from USB and see the existing RAID pair as a single disk before you do anything.

cheers, Paul

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