Hi guys, I require your knowledge please. I need to run an SSD for an OS and then two HDD's in RAID 1 for storage. I've never tried to do this on a motherboard, but for whatever reason I have in my head I won't be able to do both using the onboard, I get the feeling it will be one or the other. The motherboard in question is : http://www.gigabyte.com/products/product-page.aspx?pid=5495#ov I haven't read through the manual yet but do you think you could use a PCIe M.2 SSD for the OS then use the onboard sata controller in RAID for the HDDs? https://www.scan.co.uk/shop/computer-hardware/all/hard-drives-ssd/ssd-pcie-m2-nvme-ahci-ssd Advice please folks <3 Also if it works, NVME over AHCI right?
I only want to run raid 1 on the mechanical sata hdds. The ssd won't be running in raid which is why I didn't think a sata ssd would work alongside the mechanical hdds.
Sorry, i misread... ...though it's entirely irrelevant. Providing there's both enough drives to make them & raid enabled SATA ports(*) to connect them, you can have any combination of non-raid & raid options with that intel controller. [(*) it's irrelevant to what you're doing, but, with my X99 board then 4 of the 10 intel SATA ports do not natively support raid - so i would have to do them via a s/w option if i was so inclined.] Yeah, clearly you've managed to miscue yourself, but if you think that an optical drive couldn't be in a raid array, then it's kind of logical that it'd work.
Didn't even think about an optical, doh. I do like the speeds on the PCIe nvme drives though. That should work too shouldn't it as it doesn't touch the sata controller which can be left to raid the mechanical hdds. All advice welcome it's not something I've touched before so I'm at your mercy.
As i've said before on here, unless you've some specific i/o that will materially gain from the higher speeds then they're really not worth the premium that's being asked for them atm. Now, i've got some odd highly sequential tasks that will run on as many threads as i can throw at them - & even with an o/c'd 5960X then i'm still not bottlenecked with a pair of 830s in R0... ...whilst it's incredibly unlikely that any consumer usage would require a highly random i/o that could gain. That's not to say that there couldn't be exceptions - so, for example, if you were competitively gaming & the quicker the level loaded the earlier you spawned then a few ms might be enough to give an advantage... ...but, again, it's a 'somewhat' specialised usage. From my perspective, having been using SSDs since 2009 & gone through a whole set of different setups, what will be much more interesting is when 2.5/3.5" U.2 drives (which can be connected to m.2 via an adaptor) are released - both as the capacities can be much larger (without needing higher capacity nand dies) which should bring the price down noticeably... ...&, separately, there will be much less chance of any thermal throttling when hammering the thing. That said, there can also be things like being able to show off that 'could' come into it & that 'might' add value to some people - but there's just some times where the gains you can get by spending more money are too marginal for most people. Yeah, so unless you've got a really odd usage (or money to burn), just buy something like the 850 Evo, as, for example the 500GB can be gotten for a bit less than £132 & you're far more likely to gain from having extra capacity than extra speed.
I can't say I've ever ran an 2.5" SSD and a mech raid array together from the same set of sata ports, will windows not kick up a fuss saying the SSD isn't running in AHCI ?
No - single drives are in ahci when the intel controller's set to raid. Oh, & whilst i think, there's no issue with bandwidth, as testing with 6x SSDs in R0 on the Z170 it limits to a little under 2000MB/s.
Did you say, is this a scratch build or an upgrade to a system that is already implemented? If it is an upgrade and you switch the intel controller from AHCI to RAID you may need to go through some restarts/safe modes to get the RAID drivers installed before it boots. If you are building from scratch then just switch the controller to RAID mode in bios before installing anything. As above, switching controller mode will not effect performance on single disks and RAID disks on the same controller, but it does have an impact on the drivers your OS needs, so if you are scratch building do this first. I was upgrading and cloned a single OS disk over to a RAID array on Windows 10 on my main rig a few months ago, slightly scary but did work. The issue in this case was that my Windows install did not have the RAID drivers on startup so I had to fix this afterwards. Now running a RAID 0 OS disk plus a non-RAID sisk off the same controller, no issues. *Edit Also, when I say scratch build I mean your hard drives are empty, if you need to keep the data also be careful as creating an array will usually format the drives. I think the software intel provides for use in Windows may be able to create an array from a drive with data (look for 'expand array' option), but the bios app will not.
