I want to add an SSD to an older HP desktop with two 500 GB mechanical drives in RAID 0 [View all]

I have 7 year old HP desktop. It has two 500 GB mechanical drives in a RAID 0, 1 terabyte configuration. I just did an SSD upgrade with a Samsung 500 GB SSD on my laptop and it worked very well. I cloned the existing mechanical drive to the SSD using a USB cable and then replaced the mechanical drive with the cloned SSD. This worked very well. It cut my boot time way down and everything runs faster.

Now I want to do the same on an HP desktop. I have about 250 GB used counting the OS, programs and data. The new SSD is a 500 GB so it will hold what I have now. I want to keep the existing mechanical drives for data. It dawned on me that this might not be as simple to do as I thought. What I plan to do is install the SSD and hook it up to a spare SATA port (not where the RAID drives are connected). I will clone the RAID 0 C: drive using the Samsung cloning software. Then I will remove or disconnect the existing mechanical drives and reboot. I might have to change the boot order in the BIOS settings.

Here is where I am stumped. I am thinking I might reformat the existing mechanical drives on another PC and plug them back into the desktop. Can I keep the RAID 0 setting and use these drives for data? I have a sinking feeling that this might not work and that the PC still might try to boot from the RAID drives when they are installed. I suppose I can turn off RAID in the BIOS and just install them as single 500 GB drives? Has anyone tried anything like this?