M.2 SSD and a Raid 10

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tanman23

tanman23

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Apr 2, 2012
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Hello Forum,

Is it possible to have a new M.2 ssd running my operating system and to have a Raid 10 with four corsair ssd's running my games? My motherboard can support the new m2 drives but how would I have the m2 running windows and have a raid 10 config.at the same time? I guess I don't know how I would set it up, as I am building my own pc.
 
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PsyKhiqZero

PsyKhiqZero

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Technically yes. However m2 and mini pci-e slots can use one of the SATA ports. So if your going to fill all your sata ports AND use your m2 slot you may want to check with you morhterboards manual to see if it would work. Otherwise there should be no problem running a RAID 10 and a single non RAID drive.

But why RAID 10 for a gaming drive? SSD performance in games is already so high that even RAID 0 is kinda pointless. Do you really need the redundancy? As a backup it would be better and cheaper to buy a single HDD and copy the games to that.
 
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USAFRet

USAFRet

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Well, yeah.
But seeing as RAID 0 is mostly useless with SSD's, a RAID 10 would seem to be not much more useful.

What are you using this RAID array for? From your original post, that would be 'games'?
 
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IInuyasha74

IInuyasha74

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May 1, 2013
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I can understand wanting to do a RAID 0 with SSDs. The drives can be expensive, and if you happen to end up with two of about the same size you can bond them and have one larger SSD. It doesn't have any real negative effects except that you might have a drive failure, outside of that it is just as good as a standard SSD.

I don't, however, understand why you might want a RAID 10. Most people use the SSD as just the main drive for applications, and keep any important data either entirely on a separate drive or backed up else where. That way it is cheaper and easier to keep your data safe and secure. So I have to wonder why you would want a RAID 10? For data reliability, there are just so many other cheaper and better ways to protect your data.
 
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jimmysmitty

jimmysmitty

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Oct 5, 2007
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And even for HDDs in most gaming systems. I have a RAID 0 HDD setup and while some things benefit from it, most don't see any difference. I just have it for space.

But putting SSDs in RAID is a pointless waste of money. If you want true redundancy then get a single SSD with two types of backup, a cloud based backup and a nightly backup to a external NAS or HDD. Any RAID, even the most reliable ones, can easily have a catastrophic failure. We had one at work. A server with a RAID 5 had 3 drives of 12 go out. We replaced them with new ones, under warranty from Dell, and one new one went bad. Can happen with SSDs too.
 
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sangalanga

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Feb 24, 2017
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I feel like you guys missed the point that PsyKhiqZero didn't really make: He wants the read/write performance gain of RAID 0 which can be 90% faster, and the redundancy of RAID 1, hence RAID 10


I created an account just to reply to this. Sorry for being 2-3 years late.
 
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USAFRet

USAFRet

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And 2 years later...
Again...RAID 0 (or 10) is mostly pointless with SSD's. It does not scale as it does with HDD's.

Read more here: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-raid-benchmark,3485.html
and here: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/samsung-950-pro-256gb-raid-report,4449.html

In some limited use cases, it will be of some benefit. Writing large sequential files from one array to another. Maybe in a render farm.
For a gaming system, this is worse than useless.
 
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sangalanga

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Strange, in my personal experience running RAID0 SSDs grants a vast performance improvement. And this article (among several others a short google away) contradicts tomshardware: http://www.pcworld.com/article/2365767/feed-your-greed-for-speed-by-installing-ssds-in-raid-0.html. Do you have any good sources? (not saying tomshardware is bad).
 
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USAFRet

USAFRet

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From that review:
"We performed a write test by copying a single large file (10GB) to the drive under evaluation"

As noted in my comment above, that is probably the only use case where it makes sense.

Seeing as running a game, or indeed most consumer use, never interacts with "a single large file (10GB) "....a benefit in that realm would be pretty useless.
 
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jordanwslade

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I read both articles and yes in Tom's Hardware it does mention how very specific occasions, such as downloading a single large file, is the few times that the performance increase would actually be used. So if you were planning on doing video editing or 3D rendering which use large files then the Raid 0 could be used., but mostly it's pointless and unlike what the PCWorld article, which performed very few tests on them, the RAID 0 does not perform better on a SSD because it's not mechanized but the very opposite the fact that it's not mechanized is what makes the RAID 0 pointless. RAID 0 massively increases performance on HDD because then the disk is not performing alone. The SSD receive a bottle neck though the MOBO because they're already at the fastest they can run through the motherboard. Therefore the point of the new NVMe drives which have a larger bottle neck. But those drives are running at speeds that a RAID 0 would actually hurt their performance. So a RAID 0 on modern SSD is pointless, because they're already at their speed bottleneck unlike HDD which, if you had a PCIe express slot with SATA ports then it could POSSIBLY perform faster because of it's placement on the north south bridge, and even then I'm not sure if that would actually do anything, just theoretically it could possibly slightly release the bottleneck found on SSD that make RAID 0 pointless.
 
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