Samsung Evo 960 In Raid 0 plus Optane boosted HDD

[allenfrx]

I decided to do everything wrong here....so my pain is somewhat self induced.

I have a 3TB HDD that is boosted with 32G Optane. So far it is working out...boot times are on par with SSD and the system is overall very responsive.

Where i have to sit and wait is when i load games or render video using vegas.

I ordered a Samsung 960 EVO 512mg (cause i was too cheap to buy a pro) JUST to store games on. Amazon screwed up and sent me two. At the price, I actually saved about $20 over the price of a 1tb...for what ever that is worth (not much I know).

I thought..."what the heck?". I will grab a PCIE adapter and run both drives in RAID 0 (one on M.2 and one on the adapter) and it will just be a playground storage for stuff I don't mind reloading (steam game progress are all saved in the cloud anyway).

I surfed around and found no one doing what I am doing here as far as official reviews...which leads me to believe that if my aim is to do everything wrong, i am on the right track.

System:
MSI x370 SLI Plus (It has 2x M.2 ports, one has the optane installed).
Intel 8700K OC to 4.4ghz - 4.8ghz using the one button game boost.
16Gb Gskill DDR 3000mhz running in XMP
Unremembered 3TB HDD
Windows 10 Pro
850W PS
MSI 1080TI X-Gamer
(oh and just to do EVERYTHING wrong...I run in 3x monitors in stereo mode quite frequently).

The 2x 960 Evos are sitting on my desk. A generic adapter will be delivered tonight.

My reason for doing Raid 0 is that I am lazy, it will show as a single drive that I can tell steam to dump all game downloads to rather than dealing with 3 drives. Losing data aside (that won't be an issue here at all), I wondered if I would increase the longevity of these SSDs by using optane, most of my files on a storage disk and splitting the steam work load for gaming by striping them in Raid 0...but I really have no idea if any of that is true.

I know the performance gain over 3 drives is negligible, but of course it is going to be a heck of a lot faster than loading them from an HDD (Optane can't help there).

My system mostly stable but it is new so I have been playing with different overclocking methods etc. and crash it about once a day. I am planning on putting a stop to that with these SSDs going in RAID 0 of course.

Not even sure if this will work out but supposedly it is possible to do this. I like that my OS is "safe" on the HDD as I have killed 2 other SSDS when i was an early adopter and the aggrivation left a BAD TASTE in my mouth as they say...which is why i sort of prefer HDDS...i tend to break them a lot less.

For gaming though....I could care less If i have to reinstall games, as long as it doesn't get too pricey (they do have a 3 yr warranty).

...and go.

 

[zyh1987]

I always thought that you will need The same drive raid 0, or you will be getting 3x minimum capacity drive. It shouldn’t cause any physical damage but you would mess up you data if anything goes wrong.

 

[allenfrx]

To clarify. They are identical 960 evo drives. They will not be the boot drive. I should get the full capacity of 1tb.

 

[USAFRet]

3TB HDD
With a 32GB Optane cache
512GB 960 EVO

Married in a RAID 0?

There may be worse ways to configure a set of drives, but for the life of me...I can't think of one.

oh, and this...
"and crash it about once a day"
Yeah....


Also, when you finally get the 2x 960 EVO's connected...please do not RAID 0 them.
That is quite likely to be slower than individual drives.

EDIT: Oh wait...you haven't RAIDed the 3TB and the 512GB?
OK.

But still, do NOT RAID 0 the 2x 960's.
Read this for 950 Pro's in a RAID 0:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/samsung-950-pro-256gb-raid-report,4449.html

 

[allenfrx]

Ha!

Just the two SSDs in a Raid 0. The 3Tb will be a different Job.

IE:
C drive would be the Optane accelerated 3TB
D drive would be 2x Samsung Evo in Raid 0

Crashing has been from stability tests using aida64 with various OC profiles. I am about done with that.

 

[USAFRet]

Ha!

Just the two SSDs in a Raid 0. The 3Tb will be a different Job.

IE:
C drive would be the Optane accelerated 3TB
D drive would be 2x Samsung Evo in Raid 0

Crashing has been from stability tests using aida64 with various OC profiles. I am about done with that.

A faster solution would be to have one of the 960's as the OS drive, instead of Optane+HDD.
The other 960 for other fast stuff
The 3TB for stuff that does not matter.
The Optane for a few pizzas after you sell it...:lol:

 

[allenfrx]

Fair enough. However I like the idea of being able to accelerate "3TB" worth of data and have the "saftey" of having my OS on an HDD. Even if the it is only going to accelerate stuff I use 90% of the time and mis cashe the other 10% and even if HDDs do occasionally fail.

I am not kidding when i say I see almost no difference in boot up and daily use from an Optane accelerated 3TB drive and my 4690k setup on an ASUS ROG mobo with a 512 SATA SSD as the boot drive.

No noticeable difference at all, only I have a "secure" 3TB that is accelerated.

As I said, the only time i have "wait time" is with gaming and rendering. If I didn't game or render, I think I could do an optane plus HDD and forget SSDs entirely.

I don't like that you have to keep a portion of an SSD empty to keep from killing it and I don't like that i can kill one of the smaller drives inside of 8 months with just casual use (have done it twice now).

 

[USAFRet]

It's not that you have to keep a portion of it empty...just don't fill it up too much.

Killing them? My 3 main house systems are SSD only. 8 drives across the 3 systems.
Not one of those drives has 'died', some of them going back almost 6 years. The youngest is well over a year old.

The only spinning drives I have currently are in or attached to the NAS box.

Of all the drives I've had in this decade...the only ones that have died are HDD's. 2 of them.

To each his own....

 

[allenfrx]

Problem with the early Kingstons, something unique to my system??? I don't know but it was a pita when it happened and soured me. I still run it as a boot drive on my old system but when i was planning this one and noticed optane was avail..i jumped at it.

 

[USAFRet]

Problem with the early Kingstons, something unique to my system??? I don't know but it was a pita when it happened and soured me. I still run it as a boot drive on my old system but when i was planning this one and noticed optane was avail..i jumped at it.

Possibly an issue with the Kingston, depending on exactly which model line.

My original boot SSD (2012) was a Kingston HyperX 3k, 120GB.
It now currently serves as a cache/scratch space for video and photo applications.

There was a major issue with the SSDNow line, though.

 

[jaslion]

I decided to do everything wrong here....so my pain is somewhat self induced.

I have a 3TB HDD that is boosted with 32G Optane. So far it is working out...boot times are on par with SSD and the system is overall very responsive.

Where i have to sit and wait is when i load games or render video using vegas.

I ordered a Samsung 960 EVO 512mg (cause i was too cheap to buy a pro) JUST to store games on. Amazon screwed up and sent me two. At the price, I actually saved about $20 over the price of a 1tb...for what ever that is worth (not much I know).

I thought..."what the heck?". I will grab a PCIE adapter and run both drives in RAID 0 (one on M.2 and one on the adapter) and it will just be a playground storage for stuff I don't mind reloading (steam game progress are all saved in the cloud anyway).

I surfed around and found no one doing what I am doing here as far as official reviews...which leads me to believe that if my aim is to do everything wrong, i am on the right track.

System:
MSI x370 SLI Plus (It has 2x M.2 ports, one has the optane installed).
Intel 8700K OC to 4.4ghz - 4.8ghz using the one button game boost.
16Gb Gskill DDR 3000mhz running in XMP
Unremembered 3TB HDD
Windows 10 Pro
850W PS
MSI 1080TI X-Gamer
(oh and just to do EVERYTHING wrong...I run in 3x monitors in stereo mode quite frequently).

The 2x 960 Evos are sitting on my desk. A generic adapter will be delivered tonight.

My reason for doing Raid 0 is that I am lazy, it will show as a single drive that I can tell steam to dump all game downloads to rather than dealing with 3 drives. Losing data aside (that won't be an issue here at all), I wondered if I would increase the longevity of these SSDs by using optane, most of my files on a storage disk and splitting the steam work load for gaming by striping them in Raid 0...but I really have no idea if any of that is true.

I know the performance gain over 3 drives is negligible, but of course it is going to be a heck of a lot faster than loading them from an HDD (Optane can't help there).

My system mostly stable but it is new so I have been playing with different overclocking methods etc. and crash it about once a day. I am planning on putting a stop to that with these SSDs going in RAID 0 of course.

Not even sure if this will work out but supposedly it is possible to do this. I like that my OS is "safe" on the HDD as I have killed 2 other SSDS when i was an early adopter and the aggrivation left a BAD TASTE in my mouth as they say...which is why i sort of prefer HDDS...i tend to break them a lot less.

For gaming though....I could care less If i have to reinstall games, as long as it doesn't get too pricey (they do have a 3 yr warranty).

...and go.

The best and least painfull way here is to do this:

1 960 as the os, programs and some other stuff drive.
1 960 as the games and stuff drive
The 3tb hdd as the vault drive where not often accesed data can be

The optane on craigslist.

Raid 0 is odd and unless you have a dedicated raid card with battery backup and whatnot I do not recommend it in the slightest due to how easy it is to mess things up.
Another problem with optane is that it's a cache and one it needs data from the drive it can result in stutters in game when the drive goes inactive. It has things to keep the drive active but this then leads to a drive being active when it shouldn't shortening the lifespan a bit more.

 

[allenfrx]

Painful is right.

I couldn't use any package install utilities.

I am not that tech saavy and had to figure everything out manually from bios settings to Windows configurations.

I got it done.

Right now it runs like a 4TB SSD....meaning my windows AND games/Storage intensive tasks are SSD accelerated in some fadhion.

It FEELS like a 4tbSSD....but for $600ish rather than the $2,400 that 2x Samsung 960 pros would have cost.

Benchmarks are impressive....up to 2x a single 960pro.

3dmark loads about 5sh times faster, Rise ofvthe Tomb raider is darn near "instant-load", optane boosted windows 10 loads in under 20 seconds (faster than my sata SSD system).

FWIW I did try not to run the 960s as a singled stripped drive.

Oddly enogh, on my board, the M.2/Optane genie and RAID MUST be enabled for optane to work.

Only I could only get the system to recognize the 960 in the M.2 slot....not the one in the PCIE adapter.......could have been user error.

Oddly enough, if I enabled the settings to stripe the two drives together...it worked....just no samsung magician.

Intel Rapid Storage can't even see it correctly.

Yet i got windows to see it, initialized and stripped them together and what do yoi know...a single raid 0 960 drive appeared.

Benchmarks show small flie sizes below 16k run half as fast while file sizes 16k to 32k are about the same and everything from there up are roughly double the speed of a single 960evo.

I think it might actually be slower in raid 0 as a boot drive as someone pointed out.

As a game save though, it feels blazing fast.

The optane is also quite nice as it outperforms ssds on randoms which makes it a nice boot and 0S cashe.

If the array crashes all i lose ar games (don't evem lose the game progress or stats) so unless it crashes more than a few times a year....data loss isn't a concern....even 3x a year, i can re-inatalize and reinstall steam and games in no time.

I do plan to clone my hdd and get a better UPS though.

There will be zero gaming activity done via the hdd+optane w this set up.