M.2 Raid 0 real world performance?

[TaylorHu]

Hello all,

I have an AMD platform, with the Asus Crosshair Hero VII motherboard. This mobo has two PCIE 3.0 M.2 slots, meaning you can RAID 0 the M.2 drives. See this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QMfb_kmGLh0

But just because I can, not sure if I should? This would be for my OS and Programs drive, still have plenty of backup drives for data, so not worried about redundancy. So it would only be for a performance boost, I just can't find any actual real world performance increase numbers on raiding M.2 drives. Benchmarks are one thing, but will I actually notice it in the real world in any way? I mainly use my computer for gaming, programming and photography. Anything that could speed up my Lightroom performance would be great, editing in that is such a pain.

Related note, I've read some concerns that using the top M.2 slot on that board steals some bandwidth from the GPU, but not sure if that actually affects the GPU's performance in any way.

Thoughts?

[Mira Yurizaki]

A single NVMe drive I've found has little appreciable performance improvement in loading times than a SATA SSD, at least for loading applications. I could probably do something this weekend to run a few loading tests.

 

As for taking up lanes:

• If you're using a consumer platform like Intel's LGA115x or AMD's socket AM4, NVMe drives don't touch the PCIe lanes for graphics. On Intel platforms, the NVMe lanes come from the chipset. On AMD platforms, the CPU has 4 general purpose lanes that are used, otherwise it comes from the chipset.
• If you're using an HEDT platform, then NVMe drives may use some PCIe lanes from the CPU. But most HEDT CPUS have more than enough lanes to support a video card plus a few NVMe drives.
• Even if the NVMe drive is taking some lanes away, x8 is plenty for all except the Titan V and RTX 2080 Ti. Even then, their performance suffers a little bit.