SSD RAID Question

[DanielNS84]

Okay, I have 4 RAID's currently on my main gaming PC and had some questions about performance/reliability and want to know what setup would be best. 

 

Current Setup:

Dual 8TB Seagate NAS Drives in RAID-1 for My Pictures/Videos/Documents (Daily Backup to an External) - RAID Using Intel RST

Dual 5TB Western Digital Blue Drives in RAID-0 for Downloads/Movies/Nonsense - RAID Using Intel RST

Triple 1TB 970 Evo M.2 Drives in RAID-0 as My Primary Game/Steam/Origin/Epic/Rockstar Drive (1 Drive on My Motherboard, 2 in PCIE Card) - Software RAID in Windows

Dual 1.6TB Toshiba PX04SMB160 Enterprise SSD's in RAID-0 on a Dell PERC H730 W/ a Built-In Battery as a Secondary Games Drive - Actual Hardware RAID Built Using Recommended Settings from Dell (No Cache, Write Back, Etc...)

 

Now, I've seen a lot of discussion about what the best way to go here is and was hoping for some input/assistance on what, if anything, should be changed around...should I try to find a hardware solution for my 970 RAID? Should I not be using RST at all? I've seen a lot of negative stuff about RST's "fake RAID" being even worse than software so I'm curious if that's true and if there are serious performance/reliability problems with it. Should I swap the HDD RAIDs over to my PERC H730? There are 2 of the 8 connections in use on the H730 so I could potentially move all 4 HDD's over to it if it will result in a better system overall so I'm curious about what you guys think (and whether it would import the configurations or if I should just backup the data and create them from scratch on it which is also an option), with this quarantine I should have plenty of time to make changes. Thanks!

 

[IcarusLSC]

How'd you get three M.2 drives on a MB with only two connectors? It also shares M.2 with Sata 5 and 6 are disabled then? Something fishy going on here?

 

Quote

*3 M2X4_1 socket shares lane with the SATA6G_56 connector:
When using the M2X4_1 socket is PCIe or SATA device, the SATA_56 connector will be disabled.When using the SATA_56 connector, no device must be connected to the M2X4_1 connector.
M2X4_2 socket shares lane with the U.2_2 and SATA6G_12 connector:
When using the M2X4_2 socket is PCIe or SATA device, the U.2_2 connector will be disabled.
When using the M2X4_2 socket is SATA device, the SATA6G_12 connector will be disabled.When using the U.2_2 connector, no device must be connected to the M2X4_2 socket.

 

[DanielNS84]

43 minutes ago, IcarusLSC said:

How'd you get three M.2 drives on a MB with only two connectors? It also shares M.2 with Sata 5 and 6 are disabled then? Something fishy going on here?

 

 

Did you read the text at all?

Triple 1TB 970 Evo M.2 Drives in RAID-0 as My Primary Game/Steam/Origin/Epic/Rockstar Drive (1 Drive on My Motherboard, 2 in PCIE Card) - Software RAID in Windows

 

Edit: Also, this particular board (Which I got specifically because a workstation board was the only one that had enough lanes for everything I wanted to do) has a PLX chip so I have extra lanes for all my add-in cards in case you're curious about that too - Link Here

 

Edit 2: Also, about the SATA ports, I'm only using 4 total for my HDD's so 5 and 6 being disabled if I was using the 2nd M.2 slot (which I am not, specifically because that would run up against the DMI limit of 4GB/s which I posted a video about that's linked at the bottom of my signature) isn't important. Plus I have 6 SAS12/SATA3 ports free on my H730 which is what I was asking about lol.

[DanielNS84]

System Summary from HWInfo:

[DanielNS84]

Anyone? I know we have some RAID experts here...

[IcarusLSC]

I did read it, it was clear as mud so I asked. GL figuring it out...

[kirashi]

On 3/19/2020 at 6:42 AM, DanielNS84 said:

Should I swap the HDD RAIDs over to my PERC H730?

If you have to use hardware RAID, sure, but otherwise I recommend getting an HBA card (or flashing a compatible LSI hardware RAID card into IT-mode) and running a software RAID solution like ZFS. If you're sticking with Windows, then you could also go with a software solution called StableBit DrivePool, which is what I use at home to pool my 2x 3TB HDDs and 2x 500GB SSD's into 2 virtual drives with RAID 1 write redundancy and RAID 0 read speed.

 

Oh, and please remember that RAID is NOT a BACKUP, so make sure you have at least 3 copies of anything irreplaceable stored on 2 different mediums aside from your production system with at least 1 copy being stored offsite. Cloud services work fine to, so long as you utilize multiple providers in the event that one becomes inaccessible for some reason.