ASUS Maximus VIII Hero, RAID and M.2

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Shipster9955

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Jan 3, 2017
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I am currently running 2 SSD's in RAID 0 on the primary controller as my boot drive. Am I able to add an M.2 drive in this configuration? The goal would be to clone the boot drive to the M.2 and maintain the RAID array as additional storage.

GTX1080
32 GB DDR4
Windows 10 64bit
2x 512 MB SSDs in Raid 0
2TB mechanical drive
DVD drive
 
From the ASUS Webpage

Intel® Z170 chipset :
Click to expand...
1 x M.2 x4 Socket 3with M Key, type 2242/2260/2280/22110 storage devices support (both SATA & PCIE mode)*1
6 x SATA 6Gb/s port(s), gray, , 4 ports from 2 x SATA Express
2 x SATA Express port
Support Raid 0, 1, 5, 10
Intel® Rapid Storage Technology supports*2
Supports Intel® Smart Response Technology*2
ASMedia® ASM1061 controller :
2 x SATA 6Gb/s port(s), black, *3

*1 When the M.2 Socket 3 is operating in SATA mode, SATA port 1 will be disabled.
*3 These SATA ports are for data hard drives only. ATAPI devices are not supported.
Click to expand...

Short answer: YES

Long answer:
You have 6 SATA ports from the Z170 and 2 SATA ports from the ASMedia controller.

You currently have 4 SATA devices. Adding a SATA M.2 SSD will add one SATA device; adding a PCIE/NVME SSD will not add other SATA devices and you will still be under the 8 SATA device limit.
 
mda said:
From the ASUS Webpage



Short answer: YES

Long answer:
You have 6 SATA ports from the Z170 and 2 SATA ports from the ASMedia controller.

You currently have 4 SATA devices. Adding a SATA M.2 SSD will add one SATA device; adding a PCIE/NVME SSD will not add other SATA devices and you will still be under the 8 SATA device limit.
Click to expand...



Thank you! I just wasn't sure with the PCIe lanes and all of that stuff if it would still work.
 
The only time that PCIE lanes will be a problem is if you will be running multi GPU and have several PCIE M2 SSDs.

The Z170 has a total of 20 PCIE lanes so:
SLI/CF will take up 2*8 lanes, and one NVME M2 will take up a maximum of 4 lanes depending on the device. Therefore, 8+8+4 = 20 and your PCIE lanes are full.

SLI/CF + 2-3 NVME/PCIE will be a problem in this case as you exceed the number of PCIE lanes the Z170 has.
 
One last question. Like I said in my initial post, I'm looking to possibly clone my existing boot drive which is a RAID 0 array of 2 Samsung 512MB SSD's to a 1 TB Samsung 960 pro M.2. I've seen a couple of YouTube videos showing how to clone a single SSD to a M.2. with Samsung's data migration software. Will there be an issue doing this from the existing RAID drives?
 
Shipster9955 said:
One last question. Like I said in my initial post, I'm looking to possibly clone my existing boot drive which is a RAID 0 array of 2 Samsung 512MB SSD's to a 1 TB Samsung 960 pro M.2. I've seen a couple of YouTube videos showing how to clone a single SSD to a M.2. with Samsung's data migration software. Will there be an issue doing this from the existing RAID drives?
Click to expand...

I wouldn't think so, as the Magician software should look at the volume itself and not the underlying RAID.
 
Remains to be seen, I heard that the Magician software is not capable to optimize SSDs that are behind RAID. Maybe the new version can do that.
 
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