I've had problems with RAID setups with my motherboard, so I stopped considering it. I have, at the moment, a system image of the C drive (the SSD) saved on the free hard drive, and I want to back up my data drive to it also. The system image didn't take long through Windows Backup, because it's only 40GB in size (~25GB after compression and things like pagefile.sys removed.) But I couldn't backup my data drive in any reasonable time through Windows Backup. A lot of people have said this on other forums, and the problem seems to increase almost exponentially with the total file size. It might have taken days to back up my 500GB of data.
I calculated that at my normal copying speeds (~40Mb/s,) I could copy my data drive in about 3.5 hours, but nothing seems to be able to even double that time. I'm trying a program "Genie Timeline," and after almost 2 hours, it's only at %10.
My question is: is there a free backup program that can compete with Window's normal copying speeds? I don't care if there is no compression: for the next few months at least, I can't keep my computer on for 10 hours at a time unattended (or keep it on overnight.)