First RAID Attempt | Advice Welcome

[v0id]

Hello all. I'll be purchasing a second SSD that is identical to my first one (heard that's important here), and am going to attempt a RAID 0 setup. To my knowledge that is the RAID configuration that stripes the drives and makes them faster. Redundancy doesn't matter as I have system backups performed to a personal cloud device continuously. But my question is, where does all this take place? BIOS? Software? Some switch on the mobo? Any kind of prep work to get the drives ready? Total noob if it wasn't obvious. I understand the theory since I had to get certified, but I've never actually done it before. Any advice would be welcome here, or tips to avoid failure would be nice as well. Thank you.

 

I of course could Google all this but I joined this forum for a reason, to be active, so here I am. What I would call relevant specs are posted below. No need to post my entire system.

 

Windows 10 Pro x64

ASUS Z97 TUF Motherboard

i7 4790k CPU

Intel 730 Series 480GB SSD

[Benergy]

3 minutes ago, v0id said:

Hello all. I'll be purchasing a second SSD that is identical to my first one (heard that's important here), and am going to attempt a RAID 1 setup. To my knowledge that is the RAID configuration that stripes the drives and makes them faster.

RAID 1 is mirroring for redundancy.

RAID 0 is the one you're thinking of.

It gets taken care of by a RAID controller either built into the motherboard or on a PCI card like this http://www.amazon.co.uk/Semlos-Internal-Controller-Sil3114-Chipset/dp/B00L2X6DE6/

If it's built into the motherboard, it should have details in your manual, and you may just need to enable it in the BIOS.

[Enderman]

raid 1 mirrors the drives

raid 0 is the one that makes it faster

is there a reason you are doing raid? are you a content creator? do you actually need speed faster than a single SSD?

[v0id]

1 minute ago, Benergy said:

RAID 1 is mirroring for redundancy.

RAID 0 is the one you're thinking of.

Oh yeah, duh. Thanks for the correction.

[v0id]

Just now, Enderman said:

raid 1 mirrors the drives

raid 0 is the one that makes it faster

is there a reason you are doing raid? are you a content creator? do you actually need speed faster than a single SSD?

Need? Nope. But I wanna know how to do it and experiment with it so I know what its capabilities are. Plus, in the words of Ricky Bobby, sometimes I just wanna go fast.

[Enderman]

2 minutes ago, v0id said:

Need? Nope. But I wanna know how to do it and experiment with it so I know what its capabilities are. Plus, in the words of Ricky Bobby, sometimes I just wanna go fast.

well its capabilities are that it nearly doubles your speed, and thats about it

if you want speed buy an NVME drive

[v0id]

1 minute ago, Enderman said:

well its capabilities are that it nearly doubles your speed, and thats about it

if you want speed buy an NVME drive

That will be a next purchase, but I figure RAID is one of those things your basic tech should know how to do, so figured I'd embark on it and try it for myself. Theory and talking about it in a book isn't the same. So is it truly as easy as just hooking it up?

[Enderman]

1 minute ago, v0id said:

That will be a next purchase, but I figure RAID is one of those things your basic tech should know how to do, so figured I'd embark on it and try it for myself. Theory and talking about it in a book isn't the same. So is it truly as easy as just hooking it up?

no its not  that easy, you need to set it up in the UEFI before you clean install windows on it

 

[Beskamir]

Make sure your motherboard controller won't bottleneck the data transfer if you're not using a dedicated raid card. Shouldn't be a problem unless you're going crazy with SSDs. Otherwise read the motherboard manual. It should specify how to set up software raid.

[Benergy]

5 minutes ago, v0id said:

That will be a next purchase, but I figure RAID is one of those things your basic tech should know how to do, so figured I'd embark on it and try it for myself. Theory and talking about it in a book isn't the same. So is it truly as easy as just hooking it up?

Real world benefits from SSDs in RAID 0 are barely noticeable, despite tearing up benchmarks. http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/ssd-raid-benchmark,review-32689.html

[v0id]

3 minutes ago, Enderman said:

no its not  that easy, you need to set it up in the UEFI before you clean install windows on it

 

You mean I gotta install Windows again on the second one? I figured I could just 'expand' my current OS to cover the second drive. Or perhaps I'm misreading your post.

 

2 minutes ago, ElfFriend said:

Make sure your motherboard controller won't bottleneck the data transfer if you're not using a dedicated raid card. Shouldn't be a problem unless you're going crazy with SSDs. Otherwise read the motherboard manual. It should specify how to set up software raid.

So basically it depends on the mobo on how I should approach this? Huh, didn't even think to look there first. So would your guess be somewhere in the UEFI settings that all this will get configured?

[Enderman]

1 minute ago, v0id said:

You mean I gotta install Windows again on the second one? I figured I could just 'expand' my current OS to cover the second drive. Or perhaps I'm misreading your post.

no, you need to format all your drives and clean install windows on the raid array

you cannot "expand" and just add in a drive and create raid

raid needs to be set up before installing windows

[Beskamir]

Just now, v0id said:

You mean I gotta install Windows again on the second one? I figured I could just 'expand' my current OS to cover the second drive. Or perhaps I'm misreading your post.

 

So basically it depends on the mobo on how I should approach this? Huh, didn't even think to look there first. So would your guess be somewhere in the UEFI settings that all this will get configured?

Read the manual before doing anything. Also check what chipset you have, it might be a bottleneck.

[Leonard]

best tip you can get once you create your RAID, is to backup your raid once a week.

[v0id]

3 minutes ago, Enderman said:

no, you need to format all your drives and clean install windows on the raid array

you cannot "expand" and just add in a drive and create raid

raid needs to be set up before installing windows

Ah, see that I didn't know. Luckily I asked. So I set up RAID in my BIOS (or however my manual states I do this) and then install Windows?

[Enderman]

4 minutes ago, v0id said:

Ah, see that I didn't know. Luckily I asked. So I set up RAID in my BIOS (or however my manual states I do this) and then install Windows?

yup

so make sure you have nothing important on your current SSD cause it all needs to be erased

[v0id]

7 minutes ago, Leonard said:

best tip you can get once you create your RAID, is to backup your raid once a week.

Thanks for the tip. Is backing up a RAID array any different then backing up a single drive?

 

1 minute ago, Enderman said:

yup

so make sure you have nothing important on your current SSD cause it all needs to be erased

Thank you, I'll see how it goes once the new drive gets here.

[Enderman]

Just now, v0id said:

Thanks for the tip. Is backing up a RAID array any different then backing up a single drive?

nope, its just like one drive

[v0id]

Just now, Enderman said:

nope, its just like one drive

AWesome, thanks

[Leonard]

8 minutes ago, v0id said:

Thanks for the tip. Is backing up a RAID array any different then backing up a single drive?

 

--gone--

Not really but no matter the RAID you do, 0,1,.etc, it is wise to back up the main data on a non-RAIDed drive. When comes to RAID you want redundancy to avoid panic when something goes wrong.  

[Helly]

It's a little confusing here i think. So i'll clear some things up for you.

First from the start, you are probably NOT going to create the array in your motherboard bios. Not the one you're used to anyway. The raid controller on the motherboard has its own bios which you can access before your pc tries to boot into windows. You get a different menu showing your drives and a specific key combo to get into the controller bios (CTRL+F i think, not sure). There you can create the array. Maybe it works different for you, but this is a possibility, just so you know.

There's also no need to format the drives BEFORE you create the RAID-0 array. When creating the array it will wipe the drives clear (it will ask if ur sure you want to do that). After that you just have 1 drive that's using 2 SSD's.

When installing windows you MIGHT need to install some extra drivers for windows to be able to access the drive in the setup. (depends on whether you go for windows 7, 8.1 or 10. 10 won't need the drivers). So if you're going for 7 or 8.1 just make sure you have a usb drive with the drivers ready just in case.

Might make things look complicated but this is just the setup. After windows is installing you won't have to think about it ever again.

Sorry if this is a pointless post, but i felt a need to type it out so it's really clear