How do you mean "safely"?You say you are already using the RAID volume for storage, there is no reason to assume the data on it will be affected by an installation of Windows on another volume, and if you are running Windows 7 currently then there must be drivers for your RAID controller to be able to access the data. To avoid wear on the SSD you should get into the habit of using your storage volume for temporary files, frequently updated data and small files which would not benefit from the low latency or read time. That depends entirely on whether there are in-box drivers from the manufacturer for your RAID controller.The easiest way to determine this is to see if the volume appears (as a single volume, not 2 separate disks) during the setup phase where you pick the volume on which to install Windows. If it appears there as 1 disk then once Windows is installed it will be available too - if not, then you'll need to have the chipset/disk controller drivers ready to install after installing Windows (or see if they come down automatically via Windows Update). This is definitely something to check in the forums for the SSD manufacturer (OCZ, Kingston, Intel, Crucial, etc.) - there are often tools to help clean & prepare SSDs, as well as check alignment and there may be firmware updates to apply to the disk itself before putting any data on it at all.When Windows 7 is installed on an SSD it auotmatically detects this to disable Superfetch & disk defragmenting so you don't need to do it manually as was necessary before. I am not currently using Windows 7, I plan to do a clean install of it on my SSD. I was just checking to see if it was acceptable to have drives for storage reconnected to the MB after the install of a new OS. Can you explain a little more detail on what files I should get in the habit of writing to the storage drives? Temporary internet files...... what other types of files? And, can I just go into these area and reassign where the temp files are written to? I will look into the acceptaed way to prepare the SSD. Thanks for your input.