ROG Zenith Extreme (not Alpha) switching to NVMe instead of SATA on DIMM.2

[g051051]

I have a ROG Zenith Extreme (not Alpha) with 2 1Tb M.2 SATA sticks on the DIMM.2 card. The price for 1Tb NVMe sticks has dropped to under $100 per, so I'm considering an upgrade. How easy is that nowadays? I remember horror stories from early on with incompatible drivers, RAID getting messed up, etc.

I have a 4Tb array on the normal SATA ports, and the most current SATA RAID drivers. Is there any issue with the NVMe RAID drivers and the SATA ports?

I figure I'll have to do the following steps:

1. Clone my boot drive off of the M.2 SATA RAID.
2. Switch the firmware to enable NVMe.
3. Replace the old M.2 SATA with NVMe sticks.
4. Set up array on NVMe drives.
5. Boot the clone drive
6. Install NVMe RAID drivers???
7. Clone updated boot drive back to NVMe RAID.
8. Boot from NVMe RAID

The "Install NVMe RAID drivers" part is my concern. Anyone have any experience with the most recent 9.2.0.120 AMD RAID Drivers package (7/7/2019)? Any additional steps I need to take? This seems like a totally safe operation...my old M.2 sticks will be untouched so I can just swap them back in if something goes wrong.

[FalloutBoy]

I would like to know also if you can place this device in the board with no drives in it - I like the aesthetic of it and what effects would it have if the board was unpopulated?

[g051051]

I would like to know also if you can place this device in the board with no drives in it - I like the aesthetic of it and what effects would it have if the board was unpopulated?

I don't get your meaning. What device? How would it work with no drives? Or do you just mean 1 M.2 stick in the 3rd slot (under the protective cover)? I'm pretty sure that would work just fine.

[FalloutBoy]

I don't get your meaning. What device? How would it work with no drives? Or do you just mean 1 M.2 stick in the 3rd slot (under the protective cover)? I'm pretty sure that would work just fine.

I assumed that the Alpha and the Non Alpha both have the DIMM2 socket near the ATX power connector ( ASUS's version of a M.2 PCIe Raid ) on which you can place the card for running two M.2 drives in Raid - that may be a wrong assumption on my part but if it is there I am wanting to know if you can plug the card in without any M.2 drives on it for purely aesthetic reasons.

[g051051]

I assumed that the Alpha and the Non Alpha both have the DIMM2 socket near the ATX power connector ( ASUS's version of a M.2 PCIe Raid ) on which you can place the card for running two M.2 drives in Raid - that may be a wrong assumption on my part but if it is there I am wanting to know if you can plug the card in without any M.2 drives on it for purely aesthetic reasons.

I don't know about the Alpha, but the non-Alpha can have the DIMM.2 installed without any drives on it.

[g051051]

A little thread necromancy here...

I finally got some NVMe drives, but my upgrade process didn't work like I expected. These were my planned steps (different from the earlier list):

1. Clone my boot drive off of the M.2 SATA RAID.
2. Switch the firmware to enable NVMe.
3. Replace the old M.2 SATA with NVMe sticks.
4. Set up array on NVMe drives.
5. Clone boot drive back to NVMe RAID.
6. Add the NVMe drivers to the new boot disk.
7. Boot from NVMe RAID.

I got all the way through to "Clone updated boot drive back to NVMe RAID" before I hit a problem. When I booted my partition management software, it showed 2 identical drives instead of 1. Since this seemed very wrong and dangerous, I decided to roll back the install. However, after resetting the firmware to turn off the NVMe RAID, my old array was no longer recognized! Fortunately it was easy enough to recreate the array and then clone the boot drive back. Because the RAID arrays had changed, I had to jump through a few hoops with bcdedit, but it's working fine now.

I'm hoping someone has more experience with this...do I need to explicitly set the NVMe RAID switch in the firmware? Is there anything I might be missing in regards to setting this up?

Was this a sign of the RAID driver (rcbottom) not loading? I had a weird experience recently, where I wanted to update my SSD firmware. I downloaded a standalone boot disk, and expected that I'd have to just disable RAID so that the disk could see it. And indeed, that's what I had to do for the drives on the SATA ports. But I wanted to see what the installer would do with no drives visible, so I booted it without changing the firmware. And it saw the 2 M.2 SSDs and updated the firmware! So are they supposed to be visible as distinct devices before Windows starts?

[mboogie]

Another thread with no official Asus support input - judging by their absence in so very many threads, Is ROG support dead?

[xeromist]

Another thread with no official Asus support input - judging by their absence in so very many threads, Is ROG support dead?

This is a community forum so unless someone in the community reads it and has the solution there may not be an answer. Official support is provided through phone & email contacts provided on the ASUS website.