Raid questions

[Wadzinsky]

I am a bit slow to adopt Raid.  I've always heard horror stories of data loss so I never tried it until yesterday.

 

I set two 1tb SSD drives in raid 0.  Speed was not my main concern, but rather to expand my games collection to remain on one single drive in Windows (obviously 2 physical drives) and to try it out for the first time to see what it's all about.  After some testing, synthetic loads indicate double speed performance, but real-world file copying isn't drastically better.  (500mb/s single drive, 670mb/s raid 0)  It was a little disappointing, but I also don't know a lot about raid.  Is this normal? Do I have a configuration setting wrong?  I used the default settings in my bios for Asus RaidXpert2.

 

also, a lot of searching has indicated that using built in motherboard raid controllers is not advised and to use a hardware raid controller.  Since I keep regular backups of all my data, data loss isn't a huge concern for me, however, I don't want to spend hours recovering from data corruption on a regular basis.  How much more likely is it for a mobo raid 0 config to go corrupt vs. hardware add-in card? 

 

lastly, if I can't get better real-world speeds out of my mobo raid controller, would a hardware controller fix that and is it worth it?  The prices don't look terrible, but reliability is more important for me than speed.

 

 

Thanks

[Kilrah]

14 minutes ago, Wadzinsky said:

(500mb/s single drive, 670mb/s raid 0)

What are you copying to/from? If the other side can't keep up you're not going to see much improvement...

 

15 minutes ago, Wadzinsky said:

How much more likely is it for a mobo raid 0 config to go corrupt vs. hardware add-in card? 

Been using mobo RAID for close to a decade on multiple PCs without ever having an issue. People are often basing themselves on invalid assumptions for some reason.

[Wadzinsky]

2 minutes ago, Kilrah said:

What are you copying to/from? If the other side can't keep up you're not going to see much improvement...

 

 

From physical to physical. Raid 0 drive to Samsung Evo 970 m.2 -- capable of synthetic speeds up to 3300mb/s 

 

Other factors that might play is the hardware it's running on

Ryzen 5 3600

Asus b550m mobo

32gb ddr4 3200 ram

 

 

[Kilrah]

And is the m.2 in the primary slot? The other 2 drives in RAID are SATA?

 

Details matter, if you do it "wrong" you can hit cpu-chipset bottlenecks for example. 

[Wadzinsky]

9 minutes ago, Kilrah said:

And is the m.2 in the primary slot? The other 2 drives in RAID are SATA?

 

Details matter, if you do it "wrong" you can hit cpu-chipset bottlenecks for example. 

Very observant.  I just checked and see my m.2 is in the m2.2 slot.  I put it in that slot because that was the only slot that allowed me to use the heatsink mounts on the motherboard.  I may well be hitting a chipset bottleneck in that port.  

 

I will see if I can install it in the primary slot and check if that improves it.

 

[Wadzinsky]

After switching the m.2 to the primary slot, I now copied a file at 982mb/s.  Drastic increase! However, now temps might become an issue on large files without a heatsink on the drive.

 

I'll do some playing around to see if it is even an issue

 

Thanks

 

-- Side note, when copying to the m.2 from raid, speed drops from 1.02gb/s to 440mb/s but when copying from m.2 to raid, speed remains constant 980mb/s.  The drop appears to be heat related as the m.2 appears to throttle down when it hits 62c

[Kilrah]

62 is pretty chill, would be surprising it throttles that early, could be about the SLC cache instead.

 

That's why I have 2 NVME drives in RAID0 in one of my builds, it's not going to change anything to top speed but they'll sustain a high write load for longer.

 

Apparently a 250GB 970 Evo Plus will fall to 400MB/s after 13GB for example.  https://www.relaxedtech.com/reviews/samsung/970-evo-plus/