Raid on laptop

[Christoph]

hey, im new here at linus tech tips forum. i have a problem that i need help with. i own a gigabyte p35. the laptop have 2 pcie m.2 . one is populated with an 128 gig ssd, while the other 1 is empty. i wanted to add another ssd to my laptop and run it in raid 0. do i have to use the same capacity? and how do i actually do it? and if it does run in raid 0 would both of the ssd become 1 drive? sorry for the newb questions, i just started to learn about ssd and raids. thanks

[ARikozuM]

Please don't.

[asdf2061]

First of all, does your motherboard or CPU even support RAID?

[ARikozuM]

Just now, I_IHaveNoLife_l said:

First of all, does your motherboard or CPU even support RAID?

Windows supports software RAID in most cases.

 

Please don't.

[kirashi]

51 minutes ago, Christoph said:

hey, im new here at linus tech tips forum. i have a problem that i need help with. i own a gigabyte p35. the laptop have 2 pcie m.2 . one is populated with an 128 gig ssd, while the other 1 is empty. i wanted to add another ssd to my laptop and run it in raid 0. do i have to use the same capacity? and how do i actually do it? and if it does run in raid 0 would both of the ssd become 1 drive? sorry for the newb questions, i just started to learn about ssd and raids. thanks

48 minutes ago, ARikozuM said:

Please don't.

First, welcome to the LTT forums @Christoph; I hope you enjoy your time here!

 

Second, what I think @ARikozuM is trying to say is that you don't need to RAID0 your PCIe SSD's as they'd probably be faster than the motherboard/CPU could handle. In other words, you could RAID0 them, but your CPU/motherboard would be the bottleneck at that point. Besides, a single PCIe SSD is already stupid fast.

[Captain_WD]

9 hours ago, Christoph said:

~snip~

Hi there Welcome to the community! 

 

The guys gave you some good suggestions and opinions. Here's some points from me:

- If you already have your OS on the SSD you would need to wipe this and then create a RAID array as this always requires you to format all drives in the array. 

- Check if your motherboard controller even supports PCIe RAID. Having this RAID as a software one isn't really an option unless you are booting from a third drive and the two PCIe SSDs are used as secondary drives which doesn't really make sense performance-wise. 

- Tests have shown that RAID0 doesn't really work perfectly well on PCIe SSDs as it does boost the sequential speeds but has little to none effect on the random speeds and in some cases even produce lower random speeds compared to when the SSDs are benchmarked as standalone drives. 

- RAID automatically lowers the capacity of all drives to the one with the smallest in the array and limits the speeds of all drives to the one with the slowest. In other words, if you get a higher capacity SSD (which will most likely perform faster) you will limit its performance and capacity to the ones of your current SSD and won't be able to utilize the remaining capacity after you place it in the array. 

- All drives in a RAID array would be seen as a single larger volume by the system.

 

My suggestion would be to get a new M.2 SSD and use it as a standalone drive. It's up to you if you want to migrate the OS to it or leave it on the current SSD. 

 

Captain_WD. 

[Mark77]

1)  Most laptops built these days on the Intel platform can support the same "software" RAID as the desktop platforms. 

 

2)  Intel has been requesting that OEMs disable RAID-0 capability on laptops that have removable bays that can be populated with HDDs.  But RAID-1 is still available.  If you flash some older laptops to an older BIOS, or use a BIOS hack, the RAID-0 capability can be restored.  But hacking a laptop BIOS is extremely risky.

 

3)  SSDs are generally so fast that there is little benefit to doing a RAID-0 with them.   RAID-1, for redundancy, most certainly is possible. 

 

4)  Under Linux, you can use the md RAID in the usual fashion for RAID-0/1 capability (even RAID-5 if you have 3 devices in your laptop!).  Subject to the usual issues with md.

[Christoph]

thanks for the support guys. thinking about it again i would probably use it as a standalone drive and use it for games and programs. bcs like you said that m.2 is already crazy fast. @Captain_WD

[Captain_WD]

On 24.09.2016 г. at 8:27 AM, Christoph said:

~snip~

That sounds like a good choice. A word from me: gaming doesn't really rely on the storage's performance for anything else but the loading times. FPS and graphics are generally not affected so it won't matter if you run a game off a regular HDD or from a PCIe NVMe M.2 SSD. Some Open World or MMO games can have their surrounding textures load faster or smoother but that won't affect their quality nor the FPS. Also, some games can load only that fast so boosting your storage's speed won't be affecting some games' loading times by a lot, if at all.

 

Captain_WD.