2 x Samsung 850 Evo Raid 0 setup for game drive

K

killer_dk

Weaksauce
Joined
Sep 23, 2006
Messages
92
2 x Samsung 850 Evo Raid 0 setup as 1 game drive ,
would you recommend useing Raid 0 bios setup or what about Windows 10 Raid 0 Disk Management ?
It´s on a brand new Z390 Gigabyte AORUS MASTER motherboard
can you setup the RAID 0 after windows 10 is installed ?


I have 1 Samsung 970 Evo plus 500 Gb for windows 10 boot drive
 
I'd go hardware (bios) raid 0 to reduce overhead personally, though windows raid 0 would work just fine too if that is your preference. Software raid wouldn't be as fast as hardware but it'd still beat the pants off single drive.


Windows shouldn't care if the drives are in raid or not post install so long as you're not trying to change the boot drive from non raid to raid.
 
Not sure if this is still a thing... But in the older days once you Raid'd the disk you would need a Raid driver during Windows installation or it would not display anything.
 
I have been pretty happy with the Windows "Storage" software for combining harddrive. What I especially like about it is that you can keep adding drives to the pool and it will self level. You can also remove drives if you want to replace them with bigger. You don't get any such luxuries with motherboard RAID...you can with proper PCI-E daughter cards though (like an LSI or something).

For example, on our Oculus dedicated system I had the following Storage pool for games
  1. Intel 160GB
  2. Crucial 256GB
  3. Micron 256GB
I ran out of space, so I added a Microcenter 480GB to the pool and then marked the Intel as not being needed any more. It copied everything off the Intel and re-leveled 256GB drives and 480GB drive. So now I have nearly a terrabyte for games. And I can keep doing this as bigger drives become cheaper and as space is needed.

Also, I did install a new motherboard and Windows and the pool was correctly installed. So in that regard, it's kind of like ZFS, where it can go across hardware changes ok.

As far as benchmarking, the "no resiliency" option is sort of like RAID 0. I haven't benched my SSD pool on the gaming computer, but I have a pool of 2x 3TB on my music server and I can get sequential reads from those to an SSD of about 215MB/s, which clearly a single 3TB isn't going to achieve that. So you do get some performance benefit by using the Windows Storage solution, plus A LOT of practicality benefits.

In my personal opinion though, once you get close to SATA III speed caps (500-600MB/s) you won't notice much performance difference in games. That should be plenty of bandwidth to load textures while playing a game. Nothing wrong with 2700MB/s of the NVME's, but I see major diminishing returns for most practical applications like games.
 
killer_dk said:
2 x Samsung 850 Evo Raid 0 setup as 1 game drive ,
would you recommend useing Raid 0 bios setup or what about Windows 10 Raid 0 Disk Management ?
It´s on a brand new Z390 Gigabyte AORUS MASTER motherboard
can you setup the RAID 0 after windows 10 is installed ?


I have 1 Samsung 970 Evo plus 500 Gb for windows 10 boot drive
Click to expand...

Buy the ssd size you need be it 500gb-1tb-2tb (ssd is not a hdd)

I would not recommend raid 0 at all with an ssd it's really pointless (for games or generally) unless you just want install times to be 2x faster

won't affect game launch or loading times as your cpu limited just with one sata ssd (even a nvme ssd your load times will be at best 0-2 seconds faster witch is only noticeable in benchmarking and that's more to do with less system cpu load then the actual speed of nvme ssd)
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top