Have a Asus Zenith II Extreme Alpha (3970x and 128GB of Corsair Dominator Platinum DDR4 3200) with a 2TB boot NVMe (gen 4) - Corsair MP600. Yeah, it’s a powerful beast, but one that I expect to happily support me for many, many years - as have my last couple of builds. While it’s fun to research and build, I just don’t have time to do it every couple of years - so yeah, I now tend to way overbuild my rigs.
The performance has been great - working with Video, some gaming, and dabbling with music production where I’m loading huge libraries. Big difference from using SATA.
But wow, even after consciously managing the off-loading of non speed critical files to a 10TB spinning disk drive, my NVMe is filling up. I could get a couple of SSDs, but... SATA... and size limitations... the pricing is such that I jumped to getting 2 more gen 4 NVMes.
I thought the onboard AMD RAID with RAIDXpert2 was an obvious choice as I’ve always used mobo RAID controllers successfully for SATA drives. RAID 0 was my thought this time since I was simply looking for speed and fewer volumes to manage. I’m backing up to a NAS weekly, so not looking for any resiliency in the pool. Would be great if I could move my boot drive image over to this RAID array if it could be done (looked possible), but I was taking it one step at a time.
So I added 2 Sabrent 2TB Rocket NVMe 4.0 to the M.2 connectors under the heat shield with the PCIE slots. I started the process to RAID them in RAIDXpert2. I got the two new drives set up in UFEI but it would no longer boot into Windows even though my MP600 was clearly listed as the boot drive in UFEI. The documentation is poor and had to dig around online to get into the UFEI config and how to load in Windows 10 Pro. As I dug deeper and deeper I started hearing about serious problems with getting it working overall and mixing RAIDed and unRAIDed volumes. Many people laughed, called it “FakeRAID” and totally dismissed the AMD chipset RAID for NVMe. Also noted a couple of benchmarks that saw little benefit with RAID 0 unless you have 3 or more drives. Uggg...
Thanks for reading this far!
My priorities -
- Leverage my 2xNVMe gen 4 storage in a configuration that maximizes real-world performance
- Abstract into a few logical storage volumes as possible
- Don’t need resiliency
- Would like to avoid a Windows 10 reinstall
- Maybe, possibly, willing to add a PCIe 4.0 card with m.2 slots supporting RAID (kinda sad to waste a PCIe slot given the 5 x m.2 capability of the mobo)
*So my questions -
- Anybody have AMD RAID / RAIDXpert2 working and happy with it?
* * * * * *- RAID 0 thoughts?
* * * * * *- How can I boot from an “unRAIDed” NVMe (my MP600) while running a separate NVMe RAID array (my 2 Sabrent Rockets 4.0s) on the chipset?
- Is it possible to move my existing boot image to the RAID 0 array? I’ve always cloned SATA boot drives successfully when moving to a larger boot drive. That was before EUFI and secure boot.
- Should I stick with “simple” (that’s the JBOD-ish type) Windows 10 storage spaces?
- Should I consider Windows RAID 0 - only available with Windows Power Tools?
- Any other options / opinions / suggestions?
*Thanks everyone!
