Hi everyone! I've been hovering around the forum for a few months. I've learnt so much while getting back up-to-speed with PC bulding, and bulding my new system. So, thank you to all the helpful posters, who probably aren't aware of how many other people like me have probably been helped thanks to their contributions, and haven't signed up to say thanks.
Long story short... built my new PC before Christmas. In some ways I was shocked I managed so well - everything posted and loaded on first attempt. Thermals were all beautiful when starting my OC... but I think a few failed overclocks caused me a few issues which have had a small impact on the integrity of the cmos. Overview of my setup:
Lian Li Dynamic O11dw
Aorus Master X570, running latest f11 BIOS
Ryzen 3800X, stable OC 4.45ghz @1.3v
Deepcool Castle 360mm, in side mount config (pulling air into case)
3x exhausting fans at top of case
Corsair Vengeance RGB, 4x8GB 3600mhz C18 DDR4, slight OC to 3733, 1:1 with fabric clock
Vertically mounted Gigabyte RTX 2080 Ti Gaming OC 11g, running remapped autoscan OC from manufacturer's app
1x exhaust fan at bottom of case, stopping hot GPU blower air recirculating into case (linked to thermistor temp measured under GPU)
2x 1TB Aorus NVMe PCIe 4.0 drives
It's been running beautifully, until I installed the 2nd 1TB drive. After doing a fair bit of reading, I decided against running RAID 0 or 1 (nothing to be gained). So drive 1 is system files and a few games. Drive 2, I migrated my documents, pictures and related personal folders to. I have the small system-managed page file on drive 2 also, along with my steam library.
Now I wasn't really expecting too much of a performance lift from this, but I was expecting it to be at least as fast as it was with the single drive. However, alongside various gripes with Creative Suite not recognising the folders moved at system level (Lightroom libraries messed up, InDesign links broken), I'm also finding that background apps/processes seem to be taking 100% longer to load on system boot. Opening games which are now sat on the 2nd drive (Arkham Knight, RDR2 as 2 examples) are also taking much longer to load. I've also randomly started getting audio stutters when gaming and sometimes even when watching YouTube videos.
Not sure if this is relevant, but drive 1 is mounted directly under CPU. Drive 2 is in 3rd M.2 slot. Both utilise the manufacturer supplied copper heatsinks. I've not seen drive temps above 60c, even when transferring several hundred GB from one drive to another.
I have a second Ryzen Master profile in default PBO mode (BIOS changed so PBO uses MB reference values), so I've tried swapping from my manual OC, but no change. Another thing I've noticed (although I think the system may have done this a couple of times, JUST prior to 2nd drive install), is that power-on bios cycle restarts once before successfully going into windows. I added aftermarket braided cables at the same time as the extra drive, so maybe that's conflating issues!? I'm not sure.
This is the first time since relearning and going through the bulid process that I now feel out of my comfort zone, and all out of ideas. I just don't know how distributing the file load across 2 drives, and not bogging down the CPU with software RAID, could lead to lower performance than I started with.
Any help/insights would be really appreciated. Thank you in advance!