Raid0 on NVMe - M.2

Finny76

Finny76

[H]ard|Gawd
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I'm building a new system and thinking of putting x2 Samsung 960 Evo 250's in a Raid.

  1. Is it possible to put two NVMe SSD in a Raid? Disk 1+2
  2. Would it boot up in Win10?
  3. What would be the advantage/disadvantage of doing so?


Any help/suggestions would be appreciated :)
 
There will be zero perceptible advantages to running these in RAID 0. You'll get good benchmark scores, but nothing else.
 
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So just leave it alone? I have two 256gb drives and want to combine them as one... Any chances of SSD failing when put in a RAID0?
 
Bandalo said:
There will be zero perceptible advantages to running these in RAID 0. You'll get good benchmark scores, but nothing else.
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+1, You'll also most likely have longer boot times vs just using a single drive. Better off going with the 512GB version.
 
finny76 said:
I'm building a new system and thinking of putting x2 Samsung 960 Evo 250's in a Raid.

  1. Is it possible to put two NVMe SSD in a Raid? Disk 1+2
  2. Would it boot up in Win10?
  3. What would be the advantage/disadvantage of doing so?


Any help/suggestions would be appreciated :)
Click to expand...

1.) Yes.
2.) Yes.
3.) The advantage is faster sequential read and write performance. Random reads and writes are less improved in RAID 0. Its also arguable that running this type of configuration on a desktop yields no real world benefits outside of the benchmark tests.

Hope that helps.
 
yup, yup, yup and yup. if you just want to combine them for ease of use go ahead, you know the risk. BUT you wont see any performance difference unless benchmarking. I have 2 60gb ssd in raid0 for that reason and there is no noticeable improvement, just one "drive" to deal with. and yes my boot take 5ish seconds longer due to the raid loading.
 
chx said:
You need to consider whether those M.2 slots are fed via CPU lines or the chipset lines because the DMI link to the chipset is https://hardforum.com/threads/pcie-expansion-slot-below-dmi-3-0-or-cpu-direct.1887132/ has the same raw bandwidth as a single x4 NVMe device so it's possible you won't get any benefit or you will choke the bandwidth of your USB ports etc
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Two drives should be fine going through DMI 3.0 in RAID 0. Three drives on the other hand would be virtually pointless.
 
^AMD's new Ryzen platform would be offering an M.2 slot fed directly via CPU if im not mistaken
i don't know what happens when u setup a RAID between this M.2 slot and the other one which would be fed via the PCH/DMI though

--------
but i wanted to ask a question
talking about RAID 0/1 configured on onboard M.2 slots (currently all onboard M.2 slots are fed via the PCH/DMI lanes) do we have any idea of whether Trim would be working or not (Windows 8+)?
so far i've only heard guesses on that matter, both yes and no

thank you for your time
 
tropox said:
but i wanted to ask a question
talking about RAID 0/1 configured on onboard M.2 slots (currently all onboard M.2 slots are fed via the PCH/DMI lanes) do we have any idea of whether Trim would be working or not (Windows 8+)?
so far i've only heard guesses on that matter, both yes and no

thank you for your time
Click to expand...

Win8+ (and even Win7 now) support TRIM over both SATA (AHCI) and PCIe (NVMe), so it wont be a problem for two M.2 slots. The PCH lanes vs direct CPU lanes shouldn't matter. But I wasn't aware that TRIM ever had RAID 1 support?
 
There's no perceptible difference between AHCI and NVMe as it stands- SATA3 is faster than the OS and most apps can effectively make use of.

What app do you have that would make use of 2xNVMe channels worth of bandwidth, that the drop in reliability would be worth?
 
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I decided to try this out a couple of weeks ago on a new build and went with a pair of MyDigitalSSD BPX 120s because they provided the capacity I desired (~250gb) for a boot drive, took up no real estate, and at a price tag of $140, they were a no brainer. I ran them striped for about two weeks until a couple of days ago when I decided to reinstall the OS following some hardware changes. I was having trouble reconfiguring the array so I just installed the OS on a single drive and as has been mentioned, there was no perceptible performance difference. I got the array back up last night and still cant say I've noticed any real world difference either way. To reiterate another post, the benchmark results are pretty dang impressive; especially considering a single 256gb 950 Pro is priced considerably higher.

Results on the left were my 840 Pros (striped) on my last 3570k based system and the BPX (striped) on my new 6600k based system on the right (far from apples to apples).
 
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rastaban said:
Win8+ (and even Win7 now) support TRIM over both SATA (AHCI) and PCIe (NVMe), so it wont be a problem for two M.2 slots. The PCH lanes vs direct CPU lanes shouldn't matter. But I wasn't aware that TRIM ever had RAID 1 support?
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yeah i know about Windows support, my question was indeed about those new (to me at least) motherboard M.2 RAID configurations
RAID 1 is indeed what im personally interested in (given that the OP's questions about R0 have been answered)
so i take it there is no TRIM? that's a problem, no?

the PCH introduces latency so im not sure how a RAID with another M.2 on CPU lanes would perform or function
i mentioned it as a comment on previous discussion, it wasn't related to my question about TRIM
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btw, what exactly do you guys mean when u say you don't notice any difference?
are you talking about system performance and boot times? because afaik, at these speeds you shouldn't expect much difference there
are you telling me that if you work with large files eg 4K material, you don't see difference? that would be odd but im not sure if you talking about such use, would you please clarify this? are we talking about noticing whether notepad will open faster or whether a game which depends on 10 other things will load faster? could you give an example, thanks
 
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tropox said:
btw, what exactly do you guys mean when u say you don't notice any difference?
are you talking about system performance and boot times? because afaik, at these speeds you shouldn't expect much difference there
are you telling me that if you work with large files eg 4K material, you don't see difference? that would be odd but im not sure if you talking about such use, would you please clarify this? are we talking about noticing whether notepad will open faster or whether a game which depends on 10 other things will load faster? could you give an example, thanks
Click to expand...

This relates to the question I asked above: what app needs this?

Windows certainly don't, and most application binaries don't either (I'd hate to see the one that does!). If you're running something with this class of bandwidth, and you find utility in it, then you are working on something like a 4k dataset or say a fairly large database full of a lot of large pieces of information, for example.

The further point is that it doesn't make much sense to reduce reliability for an OS/apps drive; a setup like this should probably be relegated to scratch space, unless the drive includes OS/apps and scratch, say in a mobile application.
 
i don't see how you wouldn't see an improvement with a faster drive for any modern editor
startup/database/file/plugin loading involves reading many+large files and it still takes load of time with any disk
that's why people refer to some editors as hosts, suites, workstations etc, because they really load an army of other things, the difference being that these things are big too
so my expectations from going with faster drives is to fill that room of improvement and im not sure why this wouldn't possible

now, if you (i mean the guys that made the comments) aren't working with such programs, if you aren't already experiencing delays with your current drives then it's natural that you don't see any improvement
why would you go for faster drives in the first place and then say there is no difference though?
im asking because we are at h/f and members here are not just average random techies, so im not sure
where did they expect to see difference and wasn't there?
im going for a new system and the drives are the main reason
but im not sure about whether there is no speed to enjoy at all or if some people just don't happen to have a way of using it
as i said im not that interested in RAID 0 so im not so much talking about RAID 0 vs single disk, it's just that i keep reading the no real life difference even when we are comparing m.2 nvme vs sata ssds, and im not sure what to believe
 
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tropox said:
the PCH introduces latency so im not sure how a RAID with another M.2 on CPU lanes would perform or function
i mentioned it as a comment on previous discussion, it wasn't related to my question about TRIM
Click to expand...

The PCH latency is negligle for a single M.2 PCIe device, but you're right to assume that a M.2 RAID0 on CPU lanes would outperform a PCH pair (technically it's a DMI bandwidth bottleneck, not a latency difference).
 
If you're just trying to combine two 256gb drives for one 512gb for convenience it will do it. It will increase the chance of data loss since you've got two drives and if either fails you lose all your data. That said raid 0 doesn't increase the chance of something failing.

I personally have 3 ssd's in raid 0, even if I don't have workloads that can benefit from the extra throughput or if they run into other bottlenecks first, I enjoy knowing that its not my storage holding me back. Plus I really hate moving large files around and having to wait.

Seeing that this is [H] I'd say go for raid 0, but if you plan on keeping the system for a while I'd probably get 1 512gb now and when I needed more space I'd add a second to go raid 0.
 
rastaban said:
The PCH latency is negligle for a single M.2 PCIe device, but you're right to assume that a M.2 RAID0 on CPU lanes would outperform a PCH pair (technically it's a DMI bandwidth bottleneck, not a latency difference).
Click to expand...
i actually wanted to ask you about TRIM support for RAID 1 / mirror again because i found this article about Intel RST drivers

here is a quote (two paragraphs above 'The Requirements' header) from the ARTICLE:
"Intel eventually added TRIM support in its RAID drivers for RAID-1 (mirrored) arrays, but RAID-0 arrays were a different story entirely."
aren't these the same drivers we would use for motherboard M.2 RAID 1 setups? doesn't this mean that TRIM will be functional?

thnx
 
tropox said:
i actually wanted to ask you about TRIM support for RAID 1 / mirror again because i found this article about Intel RST drivers

here is a quote (two paragraphs above 'The Requirements' header) from the ARTICLE:
"Intel eventually added TRIM support in its RAID drivers for RAID-1 (mirrored) arrays, but RAID-0 arrays were a different story entirely."
aren't these the same drivers we would use for motherboard M.2 RAID 1 setups? doesn't this mean that TRIM will be functional?

thnx
Click to expand...
I'm surprised I missed that since Anand's articles are the ones I've followed most closely for many years, and I honestly don't know. I remember I couldn't find a definitive source for RAID1 TRIM support the last time I looked maybe about a year ago, and have since brushed it off as an impossibility. I hope you find something though :)
 
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