I am going to install 2 new SSD's to spin my samples from. Yea! But, as seen by my recent post here about my drives, I'm scared to death to do it.
 
I had 2 drives change from fantastic to RAW, and the only thing I can fathom is that they had shared drive letters with ones installed after my clean install in the past 2 weeks. Not to dwell there, though.
 
My question regarding the install stems from this - My OS is good, it's backed up. My Audio Drive is good, it's backed up. I have the 2 messed up drives and 2 drives that I recovered data with from the bad drives. All these are named.
 
Should I install the 2 new drives with only my OS and Audio drives, or should I do it with the 2 recovery drives loaded. I will use the recovery drives as further backup data once I'm done planting the data onto my sample drive. I just don't want any more drive catastrophes - if that's at all possible. Thanks for your support! - Shep

My advice is to keep things as simple as possible. 
 
I'm going through a similar process right now with my sample drives -- upgrading and consolidating from two mechanical ones to SSD.  But instead of having all the drives connected at one time (and to avoid any possible confusion), I'm migrating the data over one drive at a time:  each new SSD is connected via an external USB3 enclosure, and the data is copied over.  
 
Once I'm done with copying both drives, I'll remove the mechanical drives, and replace them with the SSDs.  These should be set up as simple volumes - no boot sector.  I'll do a quick check in Windows disk management window to make sure they're recognized properly, and the correct drive letters are assigned.  That's about it!
 
Should be very straight-forward as long as you keep it simple and pay attention to what you're doing.
 
Good luck!
 
 

Jon's method is sound and has a good rollback path. If you have spare sata connectors you just add the new drives and then copy the files over. But then you'll need to change library paths in your samplers. This is what I did. I try to minimize risk...

DRanck
Jon's method is sound and has a good rollback path. If you have spare sata connectors you just add the new drives and then copy the files over. But then you'll need to change library paths in your samplers. This is what I did. I try to minimize risk...

Actually, you should be able to avoid re-setting any paths by just assigning the same drive letter to the new drive as to the old. If you need to use two smaller SSD's to replace a single large drive, then you will be stuck with re-doing your paths somehow. You can either re-write, re-install or more elegantly you can logically combine the two smaller drives so that Windows sees them as one drive using symbolic links or spanned volumes. 
 
http://lifehacker.com/598...-high-capacity-storage

Lots of great tips! Thanks very much. I loaded the 2 500GB SSD's into the pc, and made simple volumes. I did the check as suggested, both were fine. The USB3 copying is extremely fast. 200MB/sec on most libraries. And it was a very consistent speed to boot. Only a couple older libraries slowed down at all. 
 
I made 2 separate letters drives, and I split my libraries for the way I work. I usually have drums, bass, and piano up at the same time. So I put the biggest libraries on separate drives. Everything has come up fine when loading, save for Steven Slate Drums 4. Everything is recognized, but the instruments and kits I made are not loading. Small glitch in an otherwise good experience. And SPLAT is breathing easy with the SSD's streaming as opposed to the HDD's.
 
I'm getting back to that sweet state of smooth sailing. Thanks everyone!!