RAID 0 seems to me as just asking for trouble, and really not worth the risk, especially in home use scenarios and if you're talking of SSDs.

If the supposedly failed drive seems to have raised from the dead, sure, you could use it as backup. Not in a RAID configuration, but just occasionally making a backup, maybe automatically. There's a lot of backup software out there that can make full images, so if anything goes wrong you just boot from the backup drive and it's all the same (be aware that just copying system files over won't allow you to do that, especially since that most probably won't include the hidden boot partition at all), and even the included system image backup tool in Windows generally works well enough and can be used off a running system (on Win 10+, look for "Backup and restore (Windows 7)", deprecated but still there and functional). For everything else, on the other hand, the robocopy tool in Windows really does a pretty good job, just updating what's changed, and can be automated too. But it's a command line tool, so can take a bit of learning to use properly.

just use the drives normally RAID is really only good for if you are running a company and need redunancy and its better with more then TWO drives but my experience with RAID and such is limited.

but my old man advice (being 42 lol) is just use the drives normally, and perhaps invest in a external SSD for back up.

Weird that a "gaming" laptop comes with Raid 0 setup. What da heck? As if modern PCI ssd's need a bit more performance O.o
Have we gone back to 2010?

If you don't want to copy every stuff from the C:\ drive to the D:\ you can also install games (and programs) directly on the D:\ drive itself. If using GOG offline installers just point them to the D:\ drive, create a folder named "Games" or similar to avoid clutter.
This is the way I have my desktop computer setup, most games goes to the secondary D:\ drive (even Steam ones).

edit - as a direct respose to your question:
Yes you can. If you should it's up to you but as mentioned above, that is how I have my main desktop setup. There's pretty much no downsides.

ADATA, yikes!

If you mean creating a Windows 11 USB installation media with the MS Media Creation Tool, 8GB USB memory stick is enough.

I was fighting getting Windows 11 updates in on one laptop earlier this week (a relative). I ended up reinstalling the whole Windows 11 from scratch on it (using the Media Creation Tool) because for some reason its web camera had stopped working as well and I just couldn't fix it either, no matter what "reinstall the driver" etc. I tried. Resetting Windows 11 to factory defaults didn't help, web cam was still kaputt and those updates just wouldn't install.

The odd fhing is that:

1. The first time I reinstalled Windows 11 from scratch, the same updates would still fail even on the fresh installation.

2. I decided to try also Windows 10 from scratch... and even it failed with some updates! Not even installing them manually by downloading the update .msi files from MS Update Catalog page helped, same problem as with Windows 11, it would just say "something unexpected happened, reverting back to earlier...".

3. I checked the hardware, ran CrystalDiskInfo to check the SSD and also tested RAM and ran some full ASUS system checker, everything ok.

4. In Windows 10, I finally tried some extra instructions I hadn't yet tried where I needed to restart or start two Windows services in the safe mode, one was the Windows Update service itself and the other was some "Downloader service" if I recall correctly, which was stopped for some reason.

Not sure if it was a coincidence, but after that I finally seemed to be able to proceed with the updates, both in Windows 10 and the same installation updated to Windows 11. It is also a possibility that there was some generic problem with those updates that MS just happened to fix while I was troubleshooting it at my end.

I reinstalled Windows 11 from scratch once more and then everything finally worked, even the latest preliminary feature update got installed and the webcam was working too now (I was suspecting there was an actual hardware problem with the camera, but apparently not...).

I used two days for that so if I had used OFG's techie's pricing, it would have cost maybe two thousand dollars. I did it for free (for a relative).

Sometimes the life with Windows is not so easy after all... The most irritating thing was how little help Windows feedback is "something went wrong", yeah damn helpful. There was some error code but when I googled for it, the suggestions were very generic that pretty much anything could have caused the problem, starting from running out of hard drive space during the update etc.

Then again yeah I am currently troubleshooting also some crackling audio problems in one of my Linux laptops.

For some reason the Dell laptops I've used and am using usually seem to ship with "RAID On mode" for the SSD.

It was the reason why I couldn't e.g. install and dualboot Linux on those laptops (they have only one SSD in them, both Windows and Linux on the same drive on different partitions). The setting had to first be changed to ACHI mode in the BIOS/UEFI settings, which unfortunately also meant Windows needed to be reinstalled I think, or at least it wouldnt't boot anymore if you just switched the mode to ACHI.

I googled what's the benefit of the RAID On mode, and apparently it can offer a bit better performance in some situations, but it is not really recommended for e.g. home use. So my two Dell laptops are now running in ACHI mode, and at least Windows 11 + Linux work just fine without issues on them, side by side.

Precisely. Assuming that disassembly of the laptop in question is fairly simple, I would definitely recommend the immediate replacement of these drives with Samsung analogs. The monetary cost may be relatively high, but, the provided peace of mind is more than worth the price.

I prefer Crucial/Micron, but to each their own. ;)

In my experience, RAID 0 can be VERY fickle, especially on the cheap motherboards many laptops and home desktops use. You can break the array if you so much as fart in the wrong direction during a system update, and then -- whoops -- there goes all your data.

There's also very little reason to use RAID 0 on a home system using PCEe SSDs because disk throughput isn't going to be your bottleneck under typical "home user" workloads.

On that note, just because a RAID 0 array broke, that does not necessarily mean that either of the drives are bad. If something causes the drive configurations to get out of sync, then the system will just barf all over itself and corrupt your data. But you can wipe both drives, and they should be fine starting from a clean slate.

Sounds like you've already got your system back up and running, but to answer your question about what to do with the other drive...

If you want an easy redundancy / backup solution, have your tech guy set your drives in a RAID 1 configuration. This will mirror all your data across each drive. If one drive fails, your system will seamlessly keep running off the other drive. If you've got everything set up right, you can just yank out the failed drive, plug in a replacement, and your system will automatically resync everything to the new drive. The downside to RAID 1 is that your drive space will be HALF the total capacity of both drives, because you're making a 100% copy of all your data on both drives.

You could also keep both drives separate, with one as a system disk and the other as a data disk. One drive will be a C: disk where you'll install Windows and your apps. The second drive will be a separate D: disk. You can create a D:\GAMES folder on this disk and install all your games there. If you use game launchers, you'll need to go into their settings to explicitly tell them to use that D:\GAMES folder. If you want to be really snazzy, you can also create a "D:\My Data" folder and redirect Windows' default Documents, Pictures, Music and Videos folders to that location. That will keep your OS and apps on one drive while your data (and games) are on another drive. That gives you an extra safeguard that if Windows goes kaboom for whatever reason, your data is still safe on a completely separate drive.

*plink, plink* There's my two cents.