Need advice on setting up SSD and Mechanical Drives

[Proph3t]

This is my 1st purchase of an SSD and I just bought a 240 gig Mushkin Enhanced Chronos Deluxe SSD
Mushkin Enhanced Chronos Deluxe MKNSSDCR240GB-DX 2...

And two Seagate Barracuda 7200 3 TB 7200RPM SATA 6 Gb/s NCQ 64MB Cache
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B005T3GRLY/?tag=tec06d-20

In the system now I have a 500 gig seagate as my OS drive and programs
http://www.bestbuy.com/site/Seagate...bolsp-app05-53?id=1172880157923&skuId=8294632

also a seagate 1 terabyte drive used for storage.

So I want to clone my seagate 500 gig to my Mushkin ssd. There is only 120 gig used on it so it will fit on the SSD. What software do you recommend for cloning?
I was thinking Macrium Reflect - free edition shown here at about 5 mins in http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=duW_jYVCYEg&list=FLvetSfG0RzGAY49dHzdSvTw&index=2&feature=plpp_video

Now the 3 terra drives I want them to mirror each other so if one dies hopefully the other will be OK. So is there a good software solution for this or is something like RAID 1 going to be the best route to go? But maybe a software solution would be better than the chance of a failure with RAID?

Not sure what to do with the 500 gig and the 1 terra seagate drives - maybe can go into another pc or something.

Thanks in advance for any advice or insight on how I should set my new storage devices up.

 

[lilhasselhoffer]

Ok, there's a lot to touch on.

1) SSDs don't take an image from an HDD very well. If you read the fine print, it says to get the best performance you need to do a clean install. There is a very good reason for this.

2) You have a board that supports hardware RAID. Why the heck aren't you using it?
SATA III (Native Intel controller): 1 slot with SSD, 1 Slot with 500 GB drive (programs, paging file, and documents)
SATA II (Native Intel controller): 2 slots with 3TB drives arranged into a RAID 1 array. 1 Slot with 1 TB disk for back-up purposes, and 1 slot unpopulated

SATA III (marvel controller): any ODDs in the system. The Marvel controllers are ...interesting... in my opinion. The slow speeds of an ODD will not be hobbled even by the relatively questionable quality of Marvel.

3) Read your motherboard manual. It should have information on setting up a RAID, and how to access it in hardware.

 

[Proph3t]

Really great information thanks so much looks like I will not be cloning. I have the day off to set this all up Again I appreciate the help.