New Build - Potential Raid Issue?

strocky

strocky

strocky

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9 Jul 2007
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393
Recently purchased the following new board & CPU and existing SSD's

B450 MSI Tomahawk (Old 16Gb ROM Version)
3700X CPU
2 x Samsung Pro 830 (128GB)
2 x Crucial MX500 (500GB)

Was too busy at work to build myself to build it up so subbed it out to the local PC shop

When I picked it up he said that he couldn't get RAID to work via the BIOS / HARDWARE and that you could only run Software Raid (Windows 10 Storage Spaces) on an Intel platform (not compatible with AMD)

Does the above sound plausible?

If not, before I start re-installing the OS and trying to implement RAID 0 on all 4 Drives, for casual gaming, will I see any real benefits on installing RAID or am I better either keeping the setup as is or going down the M2 drive route?
 
There will be little to no noticeable difference using RAID0. Most things above SSD speeds are not noticeable other than benchmarks. RAID just introduces a dependency on 4 drives not failing rather than 1.
 
For 16MB/128Mb BIOS chip MSI mobos first BIOSes supporting Zen2 CPUs lacked RAID code to make room for necessary stuff.
Though newest BIOS seems to have it back:
https://www.msi.com/Motherboard/support/B450-TOMAHAWK

strocky said:
If not, before I start re-installing the OS and trying to implement RAID 0 on all 4 Drives, for casual gaming, will I see any real benefits on installing RAID or am I better either keeping the setup as is or going down the M2 drive route?
Click to expand...
Only thing that striping will achieve is quadrupled chance to crash whole PC because of drive failure.
It lacks that redundancy of R in RAID and should really be called as AIDS.
If chance/probability for one drive failing is x, with four drives you have four times as high change to have failure in array.

And for casual gaming there's even less sense.
There's mostly little if any meaningfull difference in game loading times between SATA SSDs and fastest NVMes:
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=nvme+ssd+hdd

Same small to insignificant difference shows in those extremely few reviews actually doing real world benchmarking instead of snake oil synthetic benchmarketing.
Pretty much half the list consists of SATA SSDs:
https://www.techpowerup.com/review/western-digital-wd-blue-nvme-sn500/13.html
Not a sign of those huge marketing number differences in actual loading times...
Even in loading time of Windows 10:
https://www.techpowerup.com/review/western-digital-wd-blue-nvme-sn500/8.html
 
Thanks for the comprehensive replies, tbh after running my new system as individual drives vs my old system as JBOD Raid mode loading times aren't an issue even on new games
Given the Samsung 830's are a few gens old, might ditch them and get myself a NVME drive later down the road
 
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strocky said:
Thanks for the comprehensive replies, tbh after running my new system as individual drives vs my old system as JBOD Raid mode loading times aren't an issue even on new games
Given the Samsung 830's are a few gens old, might ditch them and get myself a NVME drive later down the road
Click to expand...

Yeah RAID0 completely sucks and you wont see any performance increase, oh wait no it doesnt, oh and by the way, im 47, ive been building my own PC's since the land that time forgot, and been using RAID0 in pretty much all of them, ive never had one fail me yet.

x570 3 x nvme drives in RAID0, by the way, thats 3 x Samsung Evo Plus 970's 250gb each PCI-E 3.0 drives, imagine what it would be if I was using PCI-E 4.0 drives:
XQOmATk.jpg

tJ3vUNs.jpg
 
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Armageus said:
@Jamin280672 which aside from epeen is useful for what exactly?

A single nvme drive is plenty for gaming loading etc
Click to expand...

First of all, if I just gamed on my PC, Id have a console not a PC, and who turns down a free performance upgrade ?

My games are not on my RAID array, they are on a separate 1TB SSD.

@strocky The RAID in MSI's bioses was broken, its been fixed in the latest bios for your board, JBOD RAID is (Just a Bunch Of Disks) and provides no performance uplift, its the same as having your drives in legacy mode.
 
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Jamin280672 said:
First of all, if I just gamed on my PC, Id have a console not a PC, and who turns down a free performance upgrade ?

My games are not on my RAID array, they are on a separate 1TB SSD.
Click to expand...

That's nice for you, the Op specifically mentioned casual gaming however.

Unless you have a need for high sustained read/write rates (e.g. video editing) or higher iops (e.g. databases) there is zero value in raid 0 ssds especially in a home pc.
 
Previously using a 500gb Samsung 860 Evo. Then a 500gb Samsung m.2 960 Evo. Then big sale somewhere few days ago, 139 quid for a 1tb Samsung M.2 970 Evo. No noticeable gains using the Asus X570-f. But I don't think any was necessary. Now all storage is Solid State. Nice.
About raid, I wouldn't bother either. Back in the day of the 80gb Ocz SSDs, tried to install 4 in raid 0. Fast for few applications, but a newer Intel, then replaced by the Samsung 860 made, at least for me, the idea of raid a no-no.
 
Jamin280672 said:
Yeah RAID0 completely sucks and you wont see any performance increase, oh wait no it doesnt, oh and by the way, im 47, ive been building my own PC's since the land that time forgot, and been using RAID0 in pretty much all of them, ive never had one fail me yet.

x570 3 x nvme drives in RAID0, by the way, thats 3 x Samsung Evo Plus 970's 250gb each PCI-E 3.0 drives, imagine what it would be if I was using PCI-E 4.0 drives:
Click to expand...

By 47 with all that experience, surely you have worked out how diminishing returns works? NVMe RAID0 has no real world benefit except for very specific sequential workloads or where you need significantly larger storage than is currently available or get really excited by big meaningless numbers/e-peen.

Oh and as someone who’s first PC build was a 286 with 2x20MB MFM disks, RAID wasn’t a thing back then, but I did double space those bad boys ;)
 
Avalon said:
By 47 with all that experience, surely you have worked out how diminishing returns works? NVMe RAID0 has no real world benefit except for very specific sequential workloads or where you need significantly larger storage than is currently available or get really excited by big meaningless numbers/e-peen.
Click to expand...

Or maybe I do lots of video editing and encoding, sound working too ????
 
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