So I raided 2 SSDs and now I have problems...

weird_dave · 18 Dec 2018 at 11:34

I've got the 2 ssds as drive D: purely for games to live on. Whilst gaming I noticed a bit of an issue where the drive would go to 100% usage in task manager and the game I was attempting to play would go to 0% CPU and GPU usage while it did that, for 20 seconds.
I have my power settings not to turn off drives and PCIe link management off.
I have also set MSISupported to 0 in the registry. This regedit did help, when the drive goes to 100% usage, the game only stalls briefly now, but it does still stall. The drive stays at 100% usage for a while but at least I can now carry on, assuming I haven't been shot in the head.
Other than de-raiding the drives, are there other things I can try?

Steveocee · 18 Dec 2018 at 13:59

What have you used to RAID them? Assume it's the motherboard and it's drivers? Are there any updates available? Sounds like your CPU is becoming busy running the RAID rather than your games.

weird_dave · 18 Dec 2018 at 14:07

It's the motherboard raid, Asrock X99 Extreme4 3.1
https://www.overclockers.co.uk/asro...cket-2011-ddr4-atx-motherboard-mb-143-ak.html
There don't seem to be any updates. The CPU is not even slightly busy:

Dave Burton · 21 Dec 2018 at 08:53

I had a similar thing with an OCZ Vertex SSD, thought not in raid just normal use, and it turned out a firmware update was required. Once I did that, the drive usage spikes stopped.

FreeStream · 21 Dec 2018 at 11:04

Utterly pointless exercise.

Split the RAID and use Windows storage spaces instead.

Or just manually balance the installs across the two drives.

Making life hard for yourself raiding SSDs..

coupe69 · 23 Dec 2018 at 20:40

FreeStream said:
Utterly pointless exercise.

Split the RAID and use Windows storage spaces instead.

Or just manually balance the installs across the two drives.

Making life hard for yourself raiding SSDs..

Why is it utterly pointless? It looks like the OP is running RAID 0 not RAID 1, so I'm going to presume he's not concerned about redundancy and is looking for a speedier array. If that's the case then storage spaces is not really the right tool for him anyway.

FreeStream · 23 Dec 2018 at 21:47

coupe69 said:
Why is it utterly pointless? It looks like the OP is running RAID 0 not RAID 1, so I'm going to presume he's not concerned about redundancy and is looking for a speedier array. If that's the case then storage spaces is not really the right tool for him anyway.

Outside of benchmarks RAIDing SSDs yields no noticeable results and as the OP describes can have some odd faults.

Not worth the effort.

IIRC the last benchmarks I saw of RAIDed SSDs actually slowed things down!

bledd · 25 Dec 2018 at 19:00

Agree with FreeStream.

weird_dave · 27 Dec 2018 at 21:27

Well, I de-raided the drives and had a go with storage spaces, I'm still getting the same problem. Now that xmas is out of the way I can do some more testing.
I moved the drives to a different on-board controller as well, to no avail.

FreeStream · 28 Dec 2018 at 11:19

What’s the SMART status for both drives?

Try one at a time to isolate which it is?

weird_dave · 29 Dec 2018 at 15:06

Seems to be neither when simply set as standard drives. SMART for both is 'unknown', which has led me to download kingstons ssd manager, seems there was a firmware update, but no change to the SMART status. Kingstons tool suggest the drives are OK

FreeStream · 29 Dec 2018 at 18:33

If they are connected via SATA then you should be able to get all the SMART attributes.

So when they are completely separate drives (E and F for example) and you play games from both everything is OK?

weird_dave · 29 Dec 2018 at 18:56

I can see various smart attribs but crystaldiskinfo 7.8.0 still reports unknown for health status on both, very odd! I'll have another reboot after some more games testing

yeah, used the same game each time for repeatability, no issues on either drive. It wasn't just games that were causing it either, but they make it very easy to spot.

Psycho Sonny · 7 Jan 2019 at 10:03

coupe69 said:
Why is it utterly pointless? It looks like the OP is running RAID 0 not RAID 1, so I'm going to presume he's not concerned about redundancy and is looking for a speedier array. If that's the case then storage spaces is not really the right tool for him anyway.

as already pointed out. won't be noticeable at all outside of benchmarks.

i moved from a normal ssd to m2 and zero difference regardless of the fact it had 5 times the speed.