raidssd Raid card and ssd's

Vinnce · December 2, 2018

I'm new to the site and just had a quick question i want to raid 4 2.5" ssd's in raid 0 and just wondering what raid card would be best for the cheapest price thanks

mariushm · December 2, 2018

Most motherboards with decent chipsets can do software RAID0 and RAID1 on their SATA controllers , no need to have a dedicated card.

For example on AMD, any AM4 boards, even the ones with value A320 chipset support RAID 0 and RAID1...

I don't know on Intel, didn't keep up with all the differences between chipsets.

Note that you would be limited by the speed between the chipset (which contains the SATA controller) and the processor, which would be 4 GB/s in the case of AM4 boards (because it's basically a pci-e x4 connection between cpu and chipset) and about the same on Intel (since they use DMI 3 on most chipsets, which has speed equivalent to pci-e x4)

An adapter card would be plugged into a pci-e slot which is linked to the chipset, so you may have an x8 link to chipset or even x16 but from chipset to cpu, you'd still have 4 GB/s or something like that speed to the CPU.

If you want 4 SSDs in raid 0 for brute speed, consider going with a Threadripper system... it's not that much more expensive, you can get now boards for 200$ and cheapest 8 core threadripper is close to 400$. Threadripper has 60 lanes coming from the cpu going to slots and connectors and 4 lanes going to chipset (and the chipset then creates further lanes which may go to other slots and onboard stuff).

Pretty much all m.2 connectors on a threadripper board are pci-e x4 directly to cpu, so you can create a raid 0 with 4 SSDs and get up to around 15 GB/s (4 x 4 GB/s) read and write speeds.

See also the 2nd video below where you can use that adapter board with SOME motherboards (that support slot bifurcation, splitting a x16 into 4x4, cheaper ones don't support this)