I'm using whatever onboard raid utility I've got. I've currently got the two 80s in an array, and, because of that, my board forces me to treat all other drives as arrays, too. So I've technically got three arrays (all RAID 0):
(1) 2x 80GB
(2) 500GB
(3) 160GB
So, if I remove the 80s and stop treating the 500GB and 160GB as arrays, it won't erase or corrupt my data?
Intel's RAID drivers do not modify the disk structure for any stand-alone disks or disks in RAID1, so you can break a RAID1 set at any time, or change from RAID mode to AHCI or whatever.
Intel's RAID utilities do however present several ways to break a RAID array (depending on the version you're using, also!), with ambiguous descriptions. Some will actually delete the contents of the disks, others just change them from RAID to standalone. Make sure you RTFM!
I expect that the utilities from other manufacturers (AMD? Nvidia?) are similar.
Windows (the only system supported by these chipset RAIDs...) also doesn't like it when the disk types change between RAID/AHCI/IDE/..., it can fail to boot due to trying to use the wrong driver. But the data itself is not lost. It's a moot point if you're going to reinstall the OS.
So, you risk losing data if you:
- break an array with the RAID utility
and happen to pick the option which deletes the disks;
- break non-RAID1 arrays.
Without knowing your system, I guess that your best course (since you're willing to lose the contents of the 80GB disks) is to just set the whole system to non-raid mode in the BIOS (the
computer BIOS, not the RAID bios which comes up slightly later) and then replace the 80GBs with the SSD, set up you new OS there and never use RAID again. That should disable RAID entirely and leave your larger disks untouched.