Solved 2 NVME drives in AHCI

I have 2 990 pro drives in my laptop. I'm currently running them in RAID 0 but my startup and shutdown is very slow. I expected just the opposite so I'm going to go back to AHCI. I only had 1 drive installed the last time I was in AHCI and the all around performance was much better. My question is how would I access each drive. Would Windows automatically create a boot menu showing both drives or is the bios the only way to get into the secondary drive? Thank you.

Windows does not create a boot menu when you change disk drive controllers.
If you just switch from RAID to AHCI in BIOS, the computer will subsequently fail to boot into Windows, but there is a work around.
RAID 0 splits the data between two drives. When you break the RAID into two separate disks, you will likely make the data unreadable - but I could be wrong.
Others on this Forum are more expert on this matter than me, notably @NavyLCDR and @Megahertz . They may chime in once they have seen and understood your question.

You can create a image of your raid array and restore it to a single drive, per @hsehestedt

joeT44 said:

or is the bios the only way to get into the secondary drive? Thank you.

Click to expand...

Once you get Windows installed to a single drive, the second drive would be accessible in File Explorer.
Here the C, D, and H drives are NVME and the rest are standard SATA SSD's.

Thank all of you guys. This a great forum!

On a RAID 0 array, data is split ted into two drives so you need both drives on the RAID 0 array to access the data on them. Only one drive is useless. You need both drives on the RAID 0 array to save your data.
The RAID 0 array is seen by Windows as a single drive.
What you should do is:
- Create a drive image of the array and save on another drive.
- Remove the array on BIOS (remain with RAID mode)
- Boot from a Win 10 or 11 installation drive, launch a CMD window and with Diskpart, clean and initialize each drive.
- Boot from the image application rescue drive and in one of the 990 restore the drive image created.
Once the the drive is booting, prepare the drive to change from RAID to AHCI on Windows, restart, enter BIOS and change from RAID mode to AHCI.