Question Have you Booted RAID NVME Drives?

[Markeyse]

For the speed freaks...

Have anyone took two NVME M.2 Drives and put them in a RAID 0 to boot Windows? Why did you do it? Did it give you any noticeable performance? And would you recommend it? Doing my own mini study on this.

 

[VirtualLarry]

1) Yes, running 2x 1TB Intel 660p NVMe drives in PCI-E 3.0 x4 RAID-0 on a B450
2) Cost of storage, a 2TB drive at the time was more expensive, I got 2x 1TB NVMe SSDs, for cheap.
3) Some performance increase. The 660p is spec'ed at 1800/1800, I get 3000/3200 seq. read/write. (A fast single NVMe drive, like an HP EX920 / EX950, or a Sabrent Rocket NVMe, or a Samsung EVO 970 / EVO Plus 970 can outrun that.)
4) Sure, if your board is capable. My board may be nearly the only B450 board that supports DUAL PCI-E 3.0 x4 NVMe slots. Most B450 boards, the secondary NVMe is PCI-E 2.0 through the chipset. Mine is bifurcated off of the GPU's PCI-E 3.0 x16 slot, I think.

 

[Markeyse]

1) Yes, running 2x 1TB Intel 660p NVMe drives in PCI-E 3.0 x4 RAID-0 on a B450
2) Cost of storage, a 2TB drive at the time was more expensive, I got 2x 1TB NVMe SSDs, for cheap.
3) Some performance increase. The 660p is spec'ed at 1800/1800, I get 3000/3200 seq. read/write. (A fast single NVMe drive, like an HP EX920 / EX950, or a Sabrent Rocket NVMe, or a Samsung EVO 970 / EVO Plus 970 can outrun that.)
4) Sure, if your board is capable. My board may be nearly the only B450 board that supports DUAL PCI-E 3.0 x4 NVMe slots. Most B450 boards, the secondary NVMe is PCI-E 2.0 through the chipset. Mine is bifurcated off of the GPU's PCI-E 3.0 x16 slot, I think.

Yea @VirtualLarry A lightbulb had popped in my head. I was like I wonder how many people is doing this.

I would not get a board that would run at PCIe 2.0. I wanna build a workstation later this year, I know I will have one on a card running RAID 0 for my softsynths to really speed up the load times for those big samples. So I was like wondering if it was any good for C drives. SSD's too are pretty stable and even if they fail I can fall back on my backup server to get me back up.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Most X570 boards that I've seen, have at least dual (2x) PCI-E 4.0 x4 NVMe slots, at least on the decent boards. If you were going to go RAID-0 NVMe, I would strongly suggest going with X570 mobos.

 

[Markeyse]

Most X570 boards that I've seen, have at least dual (2x) PCI-E 4.0 x4 NVMe slots, at least on the decent boards. If you were going to go RAID-0 NVMe, I would strongly suggest going with X570 mobos.

My ONLY thing with the Zens are that they seem to only have 4 PCIe Slots. I'm looking at five. I've been actually looking at some Epyc parts, and since this will be a strong workstation build, May go that way for the pure availability of PCIe. And ASRock is about to release this bad boy....

ASRock Rack Releasing EPYC Motherboard ROMED8-2T

 

[KentState]

I put my 2 1TB NVMe drives in RAID. Not really a noticeable improvement with my workloads. If you really need it however, the ASUS boards can handle 5 drives using the addon card. Many of the other TRX40 boards do as well using a PCIE board. The chipset has enough bandwidth to support the extra drives.

 

[Markeyse]

I put my 2 1TB NVMe drives in RAID. Not really a noticeable improvement with my workloads. If you really need it however, the ASUS boards can handle 5 drives using the addon card. Many of the other TRX40 boards do as well using a PCIE board. The chipset has enough bandwidth to support the extra drives.

Thank you. Did the Boot Process seems the same too?