In what sequence can disks be combined into a ride array?

Question

System administration

There is a question like this - it is possible to buy hardware, it supports hardware ride, in fact,
as long as there is money for 1 ssd disk, I plan to put an OS on it and start working.
As I accumulate $, I want to plug in another disk (the same one) and in the BIOS already connect it to the ride to the first disk
- what do you think - should I immediately install two disks and install the OS or can I later?
If later on the second disk information from the first information will be copied or not? Or is that not right?
Thank you.

Answer 1

Create right away.
It will not be copied later.
The controller will crash all the data on both disks.

Answer 2

Ride by motherboard hardware is an extremely dangerous thing. It is fraught with data loss in 95% of cases. If something goes wrong with the controller. If you contact the ride, for example, to create a file archive, you must have insurance in case the ride controller fails. In the case of the mother - another backup 100% identical mother. If a ride is assembled with the help of a PCI board, have one more identical board. It failed - replaced it and everything will work again. Without such a safety net, keeping a ride with data in a single copy is an extremely risky thing. Losing everyone's data is just a matter of time.
Regarding reinstallation of disks in the array, it is necessary that the controller supports the Hot Spare mode (hot swap). For the disk is automatically added and will not be initialized by the controller. This is exactly what happens with cheap rides on the motherboard. Any drive fails - the entire ride array crashes. You will have to create the whole ride again. Even if it's a mirror ride 1. There's nothing to say about ride 0.
On consumer motherboards of the middle segment, the purpose of the ride is not reliability / fault tolerance or increase in volume, but is more suitable for speeding up data transfer. For example, create a raid 1 (mirror) from a couple of fast SSDs, install an OS on it, this will allow you to achieve maximum performance. The data transfer rate can sometimes be brought very close to the transfer rate limit of all SATA ports simultaneously. Well, of course, reliability in this case is not important and not needed, you can reinstall the OS at any time, for example.

Answer 3

If there is no money immediately for the second SSD, apparently the hardware with the hardware raid will not be entirely with the hardware one.
RAID arrays in desktop motherboards are not hardware. They are software (through their driver), despite the fact that the BIOS has some functionality for setting them up.
If this is one of these - do not suffer - install the system and create a software RAID using the OS tools when installing the OS.
Just the opportunity to add a second disk later on the go will be.
Soft-raid is supported on both Windows and Linux