Question Can AMD RAID with Asus Prime B450M-A with dissimilar SATA 7200 rpm drives?

[sanvedj]

I have ordered Ryzen 5 3600 (Non-X) and Asus Prime B450M-A.
I have a Seagate 1TB 7200rpm hard drive along with Samsung 860 Evo SATA SSD (Which will be my boot drive).
Although, the hard drive is out of warranty now and I don't wish to lose any data on it.
I read somewhere about on-board RAID on AMD platform, and willing to give it a try.
I just wanted to know whether I will need Exactly same hard drives (both in size and make) or dissimilar hard drives can also be used in RAID 0?
Please let me know about Different capacity same make, different make same capacity and even both being different, will it work?
Sorry for my lack of knowledge, this is just my 2nd build, previous being pre-owned i5 6th gen.
PS: I have My Radeon R9 290 (Sapphire Tri-X) which I wish to continue to use for as long as I practically can.

 

[13thmonkey]

Learn more about RAID, there's loads of info out there wiki is a good place to start. You might decide that you don't need it, it's not beneficial or worth the risk.
Yes you can mix of different brands, different speeds will work, but at the slower speed, different sizes will cause you to lose the difference in size between the disks.
You WILL lose all data on any disks that you put into the array.
You will lose all data on the array if any of the disk fail in raid 0.

 

[sanvedj]

You WILL lose all data on any disks that you put into the array.

That won't be an issue.

You will lose all data on the array if any of the disk fail in raid 0.

As the AMD board I have ordered supports RAID 0, 1 as well as 10, what should I go for? And I am asking specifically for SATA attached drives on the Asus Prime B450M-A without any extra RAID Controller. I just wish to increase read speeds and/or have some protection against disk failure. Thank you!

 

[13thmonkey]

You can do one or the other, choose which.
increased read speed = Raid0 (with data loss if a single disk fails)
increased protection = Raid1
Both raid 10 and 4 disks.

However an SSD and some discipline in what you put where will give you significantly more speed and simplicity.

All of this is information is available in the simplest primer on raid, should be in the first 1/2 dozen paragraphs, educate yourself so that you really understand what you want and why and that you accept the risks.

 

[prophet51]

Don't use AMD raid just go with windows software raid. Windows 10 storage spaces can even do a kind of raid 5.
And yes different sized disks can be used with windows software raid 0 I tested it years ago, can't recall if it gave any performance boost sorry.

 

[13thmonkey]

Don't use AMD raid just go with windows software raid. Windows 10 storage spaces can even do a kind of raid 5.

Agreed, storage spaces are great, and portable from installation to installation.

 

[jeremyj_83]

Don't use AMD raid just go with windows software raid. Windows 10 storage spaces can even do a kind of raid 5.
And yes different sized disks can be used with windows software raid 0 I tested it years ago, can't recall if it gave any performance boost sorry.

If you are going to use RAID you should always go for hardware RAID, done by a controller on your motherboard or add in card, instead of software RAID, done by the OS, if possible.

 

[13thmonkey]

If you are going to use RAID you should always go for hardware RAID, done by a controller on your motherboard or add in card, instead of software RAID, done by the OS, if possible.

be aware that storage spaces is not a traditional software raid.

 

[popatim]

I have 3 raid 0's in my system on a hardware raid card and a raid 1 on Windows Storage spaces. The Raid 1 is the only one that ever causes me issues; it goes into resyncing at least once a month and takes a few hours to complete since it's 6TB. These same drives worked perfectly fine on the raid card but I wanted to try Storage Spaces...

 

[USAFRet]

I just wish to increase read speeds and/or have some protection against disk failure. Thank you!

Can't have both, without a really intricate setup and loss of a lot of actual drive space.

A RAID 10 (1 + 0) would be both (semi) fast and provide physical drive redundancy.
At the cost of 1/2 of the 4 drives space.
2+2+2+2+RAID 10 = 4TB actual drive space.

Speed is, of course, handily beaten by any current SSD.
And redundancy is only for the relatively rare case of a physical drive fail.


What is you actual desire for the RAID? What led you down this path?

 

[alceryes]

All good info above but no amount of redundancy beats a good backup routine.
Unless data access reliability is critical, I would go with a fast SSD and good backup routine. If you lose your SSD there will be down time as you rebuild but minimal or no data loss.

 

[prophet51]

AMD raid isn't hardware raid, it's crappy software raid. I tried it to raid 0 my ssd's and lost 50% Q1T14k performance vs a single drive. Diskmanagement software raid 0 is equal/faster than a single ssd in the same scenario.
Diskmanagement raid 0 will probably give you a slight performance boost at the cost of redundancy.
These days the best way to accelerate Hard disks is to cache them with ssd's and or ram(a 120Gb budget SSD + primocache would suffice in your scenario).
To do proper hardware raid you would need an expensive raid controller, I doubt you have that or can get your hands on one at reasonable prices so stick to software raid.

 

[jeremyj_83]

AMD raid isn't hardware raid, it's crappy software raid. I tried it to raid 0 my ssd's and lost 50% Q1T14k performance vs a single drive. Diskmanagement software raid 0 is equal/faster than a single ssd in the same scenario.
Diskmanagement raid 0 will probably give you a slight performance boost at the cost of redundancy.
These days the best way to accelerate Hard disks is to cache them with ssd's and or ram(a 120Gb budget SSD + primocache would suffice in your scenario).
To do proper hardware raid you would need an expensive raid controller, I doubt you have that or can get your hands on one at reasonable prices so stick to software raid.

You can get previous generation sever grade hardware RAID cards for pretty cheap. Even ones that are 2 generations old are better than software RAID. Also your motherboard probably has RAID on it for 0, 1, & 10. For best performance and redundancy RAID 10 is your best bet, you just lose 50% of your raw storage. https://www.icc-usa.com/raid-calculator/