I have trying to track down some information on changing a raid array (in this case a raid 1 mirror) to another raid type.

Senario:

A guy at my worked had his system crash. So I thought that it might be a good idea to set him up in a raid 1 array so if it happened again it would be an easy swap the drive and go solution.

The one issue I didn't plan on is the performance hit the computer takes from a raid 1 array. Since this guy uses high end graphics programs like Maya, Motionbuilder, etc he is pushing and pulling data all over his computer and it has to write to both drives when he does anything. This has actually made his computer just about the slowest one in the office. I was thinking I could set him up in a raid 0 array which would drastically improve his performance.

Can I modify his raid volume from a raid 1 to raid 0? Is this possible without losing data or do I need to put in another hard drive so I do not lose the data currently on his mirrored array?

The raid software (intel storage manager) allows me to modify the raid, but warns me all data may be lost if I proceed with this raid change. Does anyone have any experience in this area? Should I get another hard drive for backup purposes or can it really just modify the raid volume from 1 to 0?