Trust me, I did RAID 0 on 2x512Gb NVMe SSDs and the flaw that I didn’t realize was that I put the os on them and the ssds were being used heavily. I did the smart choice of just leaving them as OS boot drives and using my HDD as the Storage. 

SSDs are bad for RAID because of reliability and the fact that they have limited write cycles.

HDDs are good for RAID because of reliability and the fact that if they have a bad sector, you run the chkdsk /r command on the HDD it will move the data from that sector and put it on another part of the disk and mark that bad sector to make sure it doesn’t get written on.

@Alienware Area-51 ALX 2006  First, when making broad claims like you are, it often helps to identify what RAID level you're talking about.  But for the most part, your claims are not accurate, or at least aren't any more relevant to RAID setups than non-RAID setups.

SSDs do have limited write cycles, but RAID does not inherently increase write cycles in any meaningful way.  A RAID 0 splits data evenly across all drives, so the total number of write cycles are the same, but the number of write cycles to any single SSD is actually reduced.  A 2-disk RAID 0 would result in half as many write cycles per SSD as you would've had if you'd just been using a single SSD.  A RAID 1 would result in twice as many total write cycles since you're writing everything to two different SSDs, but that is the express purpose of RAID 1, so I don't see wear and tear as a meaningful drawback here.  If you want full redundancy, then that's the deal.  RAID 5 and 6 involve some extra parity writing, but that amount of data is trivial.  Other than that, the write endurance equation is just like RAID 0.  And that's all before even considering the reality that the concern over write cycles is hugely overblown.  Even earlier SSDs turned out to have write endurance that would VASTLY outlast what any typical user would write in the time they would have the SSD, and that write endurance has only increased.  Take a look at this article.  Notice the observed write endurance and the fact that that was technology from over 5 years ago.

CHKDSK /R can and does work on RAID virtual disks just as it does with single disks, and that comes on top of firmware-level spare sector swaps that occur independently of the OS and any utilities like CHKDSK.

Blanket statements like SSDs are bad "because of reliability" and HDDs are good "because of reliability" are too broad to be meaningful.  SSDs and HDDs both have their failure patterns, and I haven't seen any data to make a compelling case that SSDs as a whole are less reliable than HDDs -- but if you have such data, please share it.  But I'll point out that even if you believe that SSDs are less reliable than HDDs, then considering that true RAID levels (i.e. any except RAID 0) are specifically designed to offer redundancy -- the "R" in "RAID" stands for "Redundant" -- then that would make a case FOR using RAID with SSDs.  But realistically, any type of storage technology can fail, so whether or not you use RAID, you should have backups stored somewhere else.

@rcgldr  Capture an image backup of the entire RAID virtual disk, destroy the RAID virtual disk, boot into your imaging application's bootable recovery environment, and restore the image onto one of the physical SSDs.  Macrium Reflect is a popular disk imaging/cloning application, and it has a Free version that would be suitable for this purpose.

@rcgldr  Adding a couple of notes to my reply, it's likely that the RAID setup from the factory will use Intel's Rapid Storage controller, which is hardware/firmware-level RAID.  Windows-based RAID is software RAID, which actually involves its fair share of drawbacks, so I don't recommend it unless you have a specific reason for using it or need RAID on a system that doesn't have any hardware/firmware-based option.  In terms of reinstalling Windows 10, that won't be needed if you follow the suggestion I made above, but if you ever needed to do that, then you could just download Windows 10 directly from Microsoft and use that.  Otherwise, I think Dell offers downloadable factory restore images, but by the time you ever needed one, they might use a version of Windows 10 and a driver set that's so far out of date that you'd spend so much time updating that it might be simpler to just start with the latest stuff in the first place.  Download Windows 10 direct from Microsoft will give you the latest release, and while it won't restore all of the Dell/Alienware stuff, you might not want that anyway.  In terms of drivers, you can just download and install Alienware Update and then use that to pull down drivers and firmware.  Past that, if you want other applications like AWCC, I think those are offered through Alienware Update, but if not, you can always go to support.dell.com and search your Service Tag or system model, then go to the Downloads section to find whatever you're looking for.

But if you decide to keep your RAID 0 environment, in terms of your concern over system image restore capability, the way to address that concern is to test your bootable image restore media to make sure that it can see all hardware it would need to see in a restore scenario.  If it doesn't, then good solutions like Macrium Reflect allow you to add drivers that should fix that, and actually Reflect should do that automatically if needed if you build the Rescue Media on that PC, since it checks the system hardware and the native support within the WinPE/RE version you're using for Rescue Media, and for any additional hardware that is relevant to that environment and requires drivers, it will copy those drivers right out of the OS into the Rescue Media build.  But whatever you do, don't just stay "concerned" about whether it will work and wait until you actually need it in order to find out.

If you choose to reinstall Windows 10 from scratch onto a RAID virtual disk, then it's possible that it will have built-in support for your system's generation of Intel RST controller, in which case no problem.  Otherwise, when you get to the point where Windows asks you where to install it and your RAID virtual disk isn't listed, you'd click "Add Driver" and provide the Intel RST driver package you would've downloaded and copied onto a flash drive or something for this specific purpose.  Then Windows Setup will load that and be able to see and work with your RAID virtual disk.

It can boot off of usb just click f12 and you’ll see usb1 as the option.

My mistake. I had a NVMe SSD that failed because of raid 0 which deleted all my data and I couldn’t get it back. I’d personally use Onedrive or any other cloud storage that offers better reliability and protection because it’s stored on a server.

No one has mentioned if the Dell Alienware has a hidden partition used to "restore to factory settings" via the BIOS (many brand name desktops do this). If there is a hidden partition, Win 10 system image backup won't know about it and it will get lost if I disable raid 0. If I do decide to buy the Alienware laptop, I'm thinking leave the raid 0 alone and buy a USB SSD drive for backup.

In case of a drive failure recovery, I'll need to download a bootable copy of Win 10 and put the image on a USB stick, assuming the Dell laptop can boot from USB?

@Alienware Area-51 ALX 2006  Well it's true that the impact of a disk failure in RAID 0 is greater, because a RAID 0 involves distributing your data across all physical disks in the array, and if any ONE of them fails, then the whole array is lost.  So if you have a 2-disk RAID 0, then your chances of failure are twice as high, since either disk failing will render the data on the other disk unusable.  But that's not because RAID 0 wears out the SSDs faster -- and true RAID levels that actually offer redundancy actually improve reliability by offering some amount of redundancy.  There's a reason that the no-redundancy RAID 0 is called RAID 0, i.e. zero redundancy.

Yes, having backups stored off-site somehow is a great idea, but that's true whether you run a RAID array (of any level) or a single disk.

@rcgldr  I believe all Dell/Alienware systems ship with a factory image partition, although I'm not certain about that.  I don't know whether the system image backup function built into Windows would include that partition in an image that it creates, but the Windows System Image function is a pretty terrible solution anyway.  Even the Free version of Macrium Reflect is VASTLY more capable and flexible than Windows System Image Restore.  But you already said you're not even worried about losing that partition, so I'm not sure why you're so concerned about it now.  And Windows 10 itself has a "Reset This PC" function these days anyway.  It's not precisely the same as a Dell factory image restore since it would just reinstall Windows rather than whatever was included with the factory image, but as I sort of hinted at above, for some people that's a plus.

Yes, if your whole system fails, you'll need to have bootable Windows 10 installation media.  And yes, Dell systems absolutely support being booted via USB devices.  They've supported that for years.

@rcgldr  And just as one additional note, the "hidden" factory restore partition isn't all that difficult to see.  It doesn't get a drive letter assigned, but you'd see it in Windows Disk Management and any decent image/cloning application -- like Macrium Reflect.  It's not like it's completely invisible.

> system image - factory partition

I'm not sure if any image backup would include that hidden factory partition, depending on how it's defined in the master boot record (1st sector) of the raid 0 hard drive image.

What does Dell recommend for being able to recover if a drive goes bad during warranty period?

@rcgldr  Fyi, systems sold over the last 5+ years are designed to boot in UEFI mode, which involves disks initialized as GPT rather than MBR.  As a result, Master Boot Records aren't even used anymore.  GPT disks have a "Protective MBR" to prevent them from being overwritten by OSes that aren't actually GPT-aware, but UEFI systems boot in a completely different way from Legacy BIOS systems.

As I said earlier, to my knowledge Dell offers downloadable factory restore images to deal with cases of drives failing during the warranty period.  But as I also said, chances are that by the time you need that (if ever), the OS and drivers in the image will be so outdated that it would probably be faster to just install the latest version of Windows 10 downloaded directly from Microsoft and then use Alienware Update to get the latest drivers.

@Alienware Area-51 ALX 2006  The Windows Recovery partition that is part of a default Windows installation is separate from the factory image restore partition that Dell puts on at least some of its systems.  They serve different purposes.

It’s the Recovery portion right?

I never knew that? I thought it was the dell part. I think it’s the SupportAssist OS recovery right?