Correct sequence for using 2x NVME in RAID

[kidstechno3]

Had an old Z370 board that I got this working on but honestly can't remember how, moved to an X570 and my current setup is:

1TB SSD for Windows Install
Regular 2TB HDD
2x 1TB NVME

Before, I was able to have my 1TB SSD for Windows boot, 2TB HDD for whatever, and then converted my 2x NVME into RAID0 for games.

However, on my new board - whenever I enable RAID and reboot to get access to the AMD Raid utility, my SATA1/2 drives stop showing. Switch back to AHCI and reboot and they work fine.

What's the correct order of this to get this working how I want?

 

[SonDa5]

Check your manufacturer motherboard for storage drive compatibility. I like to update latest and greatest motherboard bios firmware and do a clean crispy latest and greatest operating system install.

 

[mwroobel]

A lot of motherboards share address space and/or lanes between some of the devices. for example, enabling your second m.2 port may disable SATA ports 2&3, or disable one of your PCIe x1 slots. What motherboard are you attempting this on? It may be that you may need to move your SATA devices to some other ports.

 

[Krispy Kritter]

I was just about to mention the lane sharing myself. My current board is the same way. If I use m.2 slot, I lose 2 SATA ports (which Im using all of them).

 

[MrGuvernment]

just an FYI, raid 0 NVMe's are not going to give your games any performance benefits.

 

[LukeTbk]

and then converted my 2x NVME into RAID0 for games.

Do you want raid0 just to the nice bonus to have them show has a bigger single drive ?

If so, if no solution work with the motherboard and are Windows, you can look at software side solutions (either raid 0 or just combining drive into a single big one):
https://www.windowscentral.com/how-create-one-large-volume-using-multiple-hard-drives-windows-10

If it is only for games, I imagine it could be better/simpler to just combine them without raid0 going on, fast NVME seem to be overkill already over regular SSD on that workload.

 

[kidstechno3]

Do you want raid0 just to the nice bonus to have them show has a bigger single drive ?

If so, if no solution work with the motherboard and are Windows, you can look at software side solutions (either raid 0 or just combining drive into a single big one):
https://www.windowscentral.com/how-create-one-large-volume-using-multiple-hard-drives-windows-10

If it is only for games, I imagine it could be better/simpler to just combine them without raid0 going on, fast NVME seem to be overkill already over regular SSD on that workload.

Yea I ended up doing a Striped partition in Windows using the 2 formatted NVME drives under Disk Management and it worked like a charm. It's just easier to handle 2 drives as one.

just an FYI, raid 0 NVMe's are not going to give your games any performance benefits.

Interesting, is there a max bandwidth that games use?

 

[LukeTbk]

Interesting, is there a max bandwidth that games use?

They seem to hit a ceiling fast enough, the difference between HDD and SSD is really big and than it became very small between raid SSD or nvme:



It depend on the game, maybe it will change in the next year's if decompression (?) with CPU able to reach closer to 100% during load stop being the main bottleneck when you hit regular SSD speed.