Thanks for offering help.
I am currently running a RAID 0 on two SATA6 Toshiba SSD drives and it definitely loads up Windows much faster than if I use just one of the Toshiba SSD drives. Since it is RAID 0 it should be faster regardless of file sizes including the reading of DLL files and my experience seems to confirm that.
You are right I should be setting up RAID 5 for my data which is significant (Photography RAW, PSD, PSB, JPEG files mostly). Unfortunately I didn't buy all the external USB drives at the same time and they are of vastly different sizes and speeds so at the moment at least I am not inclined to set them up as RAID. Besides, they are USB 3.0 external so I am not sure how much speed I would gain.
But what I was looking at is that the XIII Hero supports two GEN4 M.2 SSD drives. I was considering getting two M.2 256GB NVMe drives and moving my OS to them as they should be faster. But what concerns me is in the manual there is a note that on page VIII (specifications) that reads:
** M.2_2 shares bandwidth with PCIEX16_1 and PCIEX16_2. When m.2_2 is enabled, PCIEX16_1 will run at x8 mode and PCIEX16_2 will run at x4 mode.
On page XIII under Connectors with shared bandwidth there is a chart that shows:
PCIX16_1 running at 8x instead of 16x if there is a drive simply inserted in M.2_2.
What I am not clear on is does this indicate that the ASUS ROG STRIX RTX3060 run slower if there is a drive in M.2_2 slot. I think the GPU supports 16x speed but am not 100% sure if this means I slow my GPU by simply installing a drive in the M.2_2 slot. If that is the case I cannot understand why you would ever want to put a drive in M.2_2 and reduce the bandwidth of your GPU by 50%. It seems to be saying if you have a GPU, don't use M.2_2 at all!!!
Or perhaps I am reading this wrong?
If I understand it correctly then perhaps I would be better just getting a single 500GB M.2 drive and just using M.2_1 for my OS drive. I think it would probably still be faster than my two Toshiba SATA SSD drives?
What do you think?
Thanks again,
Darv
Thanks again! This M.2 drive stuff is somewhat new to me.