Single SSD vs NVME RAID 0

[cleric_warlock]

I just set up a RAID 0 configuration for my 2 NVME SSDs and things seem to be working pretty well so far. My raid volume seems pretty zippy especially when installing large programs and with the performance data below it seems like implementing RAID has resulted in a pretty substantial all around improvement to almost all of my system's read/write metrics. There is a small increase in average read latency and a larger increase in average write latency - is this a good tradeoff for all the increased speeds given that my pc is intended to be a gaming pc? What else is this data revealing that I might be missing? All opinions and insights welcome!

 

Single NVME SSD:

 

NVME RAID 0:

 

[LIGISTX]

4 minutes ago, cleric_warlock said:

I just set up a RAID 0 configuration for my 2 NVME SSDs and things seem to be working pretty well so far. My raid volume seems pretty zippy especially when installing large programs and with the performance data below it seems like implementing RAID has resulted in a pretty substantial all around improvement to almost all of my system's read/write metrics. There is a small increase in average read latency and a larger increase in average write latency - is this a good tradeoff for all the increased speeds given that my pc is intended to be a gaming pc? What else is this data revealing that I might be missing? All opinions and insights welcome!

 

Single NVME SSD:

 

NVME RAID 0:

 

I would not run a RAID 0 personally. The latency is what really matters, any increase in latency is a larger issue then massive read or writes. Nothing actually need to read and write as fast as NVMe can, so more speed is useless. But less latency... well, you always want less latency.

 

But does it really matter either way? No, not really. 

[Kilrah]

No. Latency is almost always more important than raw transfer speeds. Nothing you do on a gaming PC will benefit from the higher sequential transfer speeds, things to random small accesses and your RAID performs worse on those.

[wseaton]

The only thing that will run faster is the benchmark. 

 

The overhead from the RAID 0 is brutal.

[cleric_warlock]

18 hours ago, LIGISTX said:

I would not run a RAID 0 personally. The latency is what really matters, any increase in latency is a larger issue then massive read or writes. Nothing actually need to read and write as fast as NVMe can, so more speed is useless. But less latency... well, you always want less latency.

 

But does it really matter either way? No, not really. 

I think my experience with raid is really matching what you're saying. For my particular setup the very slight increases in latency are not noticeable at all in any of the games that I play or any of the other applications I run on my computer. Installs happen MUCH faster and loading screens seem to be at least as fast as non raid at all times. It really seems like I've gained performance without any kind of a noticeable tradeoff. It's also nice to have what used to be a dual boot os as one unified volume with the added bonus that space is freed up since drivers and windows system allocations are not duplicated like in a dual boot setup. It seems like people have very different experiences with raid depending on the quality of their raid controller and how well it works with the memory controllers of the ssds being used and the specific ssd configuration. The two ssds i'm using are identical and I've read that that can make a huge difference in improving the performance of raid. Unless any problems crop up in the long term, my raid 0 setup seems to be the optimal boot drive configuration for my pc.

[LIGISTX]

44 minutes ago, cleric_warlock said:

I think my experience with raid is really matching what you're saying. For my particular setup the very slight increases in latency are not noticeable at all in any of the games that I play or any of the other applications I run on my computer. Installs happen MUCH faster and loading screens seem to be at least as fast as non raid at all times. It really seems like I've gained performance without any kind of a noticeable tradeoff. It's also nice to have what used to be a dual boot os as one unified volume with the added bonus that space is freed up since drivers and windows system allocations are not duplicated like in a dual boot setup. It seems like people have very different experiences with raid depending on the quality of their raid controller and how well it works with the memory controllers of the ssds being used and the specific ssd configuration. The two ssds i'm using are identical and I've read that that can make a huge difference in improving the performance of raid. Unless any problems crop up in the long term, my raid 0 setup seems to be the optimal boot drive configuration for my pc.

I highly doubt your seeing any benefit from RAID 0... The gains are likely due to a fresh Windows instal, nothing else...

 

Why was it dual booted previously? Just use the second drive as a data drive and point steam or origin at it. I understand the convenience of only having a single drive, but realistically the latency impact you have and CPU overhead (it isn't that much, but it is there...) is a larger hinderance than anything else. The only thing RAID 0 SSD's is useful for is insane sequential transfer speeds, but almost nothing you do on your PC is actually sequential except for a SSD benchmark.... so the latency hit to random reads and writes is more detrimental. 

 

But, again, the gains and losses are likely not even something anyone can actually perceive. So at the end of the day, it probably doesn't matter either way. The only thing that a potential issue is if a single drive dies in RAID 0, you lose 100% of your data. Assuming you understanding this and have proper backups in place, then you can absorb that risk.

 

Also, the comment about quality of RAID controller, at this point, basically all mobo's have "the same" RAID controller anyways, so there isn't really much variation. RAID is such an old standard, there isn't really any new magic that can be implemented, and for most enterprise solutions, hardware RAID is all but dead anyways. ZFS is software RAID, and it's superior in basically every way.

[Robert Romero]

I would say without a threadripper you're not really going to see anything out of those m.2s and raid your Intel does not have enough lanes to fully utilize that You're taking away from somewhere else in order to raid I can say with certainty that I have a threadripper 2920x and with multiple m.2s in the amount of lanes that I have on my CPU I can fully saturate my m.2s Intel is full of gimmicks these days I miss when they made quality products The 10900X was their last HEDT platform that had a chance at doing this