Evo 970 M.2 RAID

Eatchipz · 1 Jun 2018 at 11:09

Hello,

I have ended up with 2 Samsung Evo 970 500gb M.2 drives from the rain forest for my new AMD Ryzen build (long story). But before returning one of them I am actually very tempted to keep them both and run them in RAID. I was thinking about returning the 500gb for the 1tb anyway so I though just keep them both and RAID them.

I never done RAID with anything so I am not quite sure how it works. I remember reading yes ago that it can be quite dangerous and partition's could disappear etc... Has that changed?

Also I am using X470 ASUS Strix Mini ITX board and I was reading that if you have the 2nd M.2 Drive installed on the motherboard it will share bandwidth with x16 slot. I am not a massive gamer so would l likely see knock in performance when gaming?

Minstadave · 1 Jun 2018 at 11:18

Raid NVME drives is utterly pointless unless you have very specific needs and shuffle huge amounts of data a lot.

One drive is more than fast enough that RAIDing them will give you no performance gains in the real world whilst doubling the risk of losing your data of one fails (assuming you’re planning to RAID0 then).

The loss of 16x on the GPU slot is negligible but the gains will be even poorer so it’s just a bad idea.

RAID0 you stripe data over both drives for increased speed. But if either drive fails you lose everything.

Eatchipz · 1 Jun 2018 at 11:33

Thanks for the advice mate!

So in short if I want 1tb storage then just return them and get 1tb capacity drive?

Minstadave · 1 Jun 2018 at 12:11

That’s what I’d do personally

Troezar · 2 Jun 2018 at 06:00

Anyone tried a single Nvme as a boot drive then Raid 0 two more Nvme to use to process large files, video etc. ? Seems like the best of both worlds albeit an expensive one!

lude1962 · 2 Jun 2018 at 20:46

Troezar said:
Anyone tried a single Nvme as a boot drive then Raid 0 two more Nvme to use to process large files, video etc. ? Seems like the best of both worlds albeit an expensive one!

Are there boards with 3 M.2 slots?
Most raid(s) are software based , so you'd increase file transfer speed but suffer a performance drop, realistically for a home based pc its not worth it for a 0.1ms gain

Troezar · 2 Jun 2018 at 21:31

lude1962 said:
Are there boards with 3 M.2 slots?
Most raid(s) are software based , so you'd increase file transfer speed but suffer a performance drop, realistically for a home based pc its not worth it for a 0.1ms gain

Yes X399 has three and they are all off the CPU so no DMI bottleneck. If you don't need the absolute max fps and can afford the extra you get such a lot extra on that platform. Lots of options if you keep a system a long time like I do.

BongoHunter · 3 Jun 2018 at 15:52

Troezar said:
Anyone tried a single Nvme as a boot drive then Raid 0 two more Nvme to use to process large files, video etc. ? Seems like the best of both worlds albeit an expensive one!

I do this - have 960 Evo connected to motherboard M2, then have an Asus HyperM2 x16 card with two additional drives in RAID 0, have another 2 drives on the way as well.

Performance for the money is great IMO, as the really high performance good capacity single drives cost a bomb.

Troezar · 3 Jun 2018 at 20:47

BongoHunter said:
I do this - have 960 Evo connected to motherboard M2, then have an Asus HyperM2 x16 card with two additional drives in RAID 0, have another 2 drives on the way as well.

Performance for the money is great IMO, as the really high performance good capacity single drives cost a bomb.

Excellent good to know it is viable. Definitely persuading me this is the right move for me next upgrade. Already have a fund started, selling off all my bits and bobs to clear some space and raise some funds.