RAID 0 with Nvme or 2 Separate Drives?

[ChrisLoudon]

Hi guys,

 

After installing Far Cry 6 on one of my PCs that only has a 256GB NVMe drive, I now have pretty much zero space left.

 

I have a loft full of old PCs and bits and bobs including matching 256GB NVMe drives so was gonna plonk one in to yield a bit more storage however, I wasn't sure if I should strap them together in Raid 0 or just use the 2nd drive as a D: drive.

 

Its been a while since I've created a RAID volume for day-to-day use in a PC so wasn't sure what the best practice was these days. I've used RAID 0 in the past on spinning metal and lost a few files along the way.

 

Its going in a mediocre gaming PC so if the array was to fail there'd be nothing that can't be replaced with ease.

 

Any advice?

[Dutch_Master]

If you're comfortable with potentially loosing files, or a non-bootable PC, then by all means make a RAID0 with these drives.

 

If your data has any value above zero to you, then avoid RAID0 like the plague

 

Your message implies you have more of those drives, why not create a RAID5 or even RAID6, this allows for redundancy (of 1 resp. 2 drives) while still increasing storage capacity.

 

HTH!

[Agall]

12 minutes ago, ChrisLoudon said:

Hi guys,

 

After installing Far Cry 6 on one of my PCs that only has a 256GB NVMe drive, I now have pretty much zero space left.

 

I have a loft full of old PCs and bits and bobs including matching 256GB NVMe drives so was gonna plonk one in to yield a bit more storage however, I wasn't sure if I should strap them together in Raid 0 or just use the 2nd drive as a D: drive.

 

Its been a while since I've created a RAID volume for day-to-day use in a PC so wasn't sure what the best practice was these days. I've used RAID 0 in the past on spinning metal and lost a few files along the way.

 

Its going in a mediocre gaming PC so if the array was to fail there'd be nothing that can't be replaced with ease.

 

Any advice?

I wouldn't simply for the extra potential latency. When your boot/main drive is in the first M.2 slot, almost always that's wired directly to the CPU's I/O die or Uncore (aka the North Bridge). Almost always, the secondary M.2 slots are wired to the chipset which shares bandwidth with most other PCIe devices, which can be as small as PCIe 4.0 4x or 8x. That then also forces bandwidth to the chipset (South Bridge) to manage that RAID volume.

 

I ran RAID0 M.2 PCIe 4.0 4x drives pretty early on with an X570 motherboard. I ended up getting rid of it and seemingly noticed a latency benefit. The best I could come up with as an explanation was the lowered complexity of data transport. Where I concluded that the potential increase in latency isnt worth the unnecessarily higher read/write speeds with RAID0. RAID1 is another story which is entirely useful, but that's not applicable here.

[wONKEyeYEs]

24 minutes ago, ChrisLoudon said:

I wasn't sure if I should strap them together in Raid 0 or just use the 2nd drive as a D: drive.

 

[ChrisLoudon]

1 hour ago, Dutch_Master said:

Your message implies you have more of those drives, why not create a RAID5 or even RAID6, this allows for redundancy (of 1 resp. 2 drives) while still increasing storage capacity.

Thanks for the info buddy. This is for boot and games only so I have no need for any redundancy.

 

I hadn't considered what @Agall mentioned about latency given how the lanes are dished out and wired.

 

I think I'm just gonna plumb the 2nd drive in as a separate D: drive.

 

Cheers guys.

[ianm_ozzy]

I suggest you consider this software:  https://www.romexsoftware.com/en-us/primo-cache/

Perhaps a large and suitable affordable hard drive for all the games.

Use the nvme drives in raid 0 as a read only cache.

I suggest you DO NOT use raid 0 for the operating system.