Gigabyte Z170 gaming 5 not enabling raid

[stueck9356]

So I am trying to enable ez raid to set up my two Samsung 950 pros. The manual is not very useful because it is guiding me through the old F6 bios and I'm on the F22 with the new UI.

I have set the system to "windows 8/10 features" and disabled CSM support. Rebooted like it asked, and went to enable EZ Raid. When selecting it, I get a pop-up box that says "raid must be enabled first. Reboot needed when succeeded. Proceed?" I click yes and it auto-reboots. However when entering back into the bios, I'm greeted with the same pop-up box. I hit yes and reboot again. However nothing happens. I can't set up raids. Clicking on EZ raid sends me down the same path. I don't know how to get this working.

On a side note, Ive tried flashing the bios. When I enter it for the feet time, my SSDs show up. However after disabling CSM and rebooting, none of my drives appear. This bios seems buggy...

 

[Darkbreeze]

Running RAID on SSDs is a waste of time and resources. You are better off to use them individually. Not only will they LAST a lost longer, you don't actually gain, and probably even LOSE speed by using them in RAID. The only way you'd benefit is if you were CONTINUALLY writing HUGE files to the SSDs, and that's the absolute best way to make sure they have a short lifespan.

If however you are trying to do this not as storage RAID but primary OS drive RAID, most of what I've seen has consistently shown that random IOPS are the same or higher with a single NVME or SATA SSD for most usage.

One SSD on its own scores again in the contrived tests we put together. The performance differences when we boot up and shut down Windows 8, then fire up different applications, are marginal at best and not noticeable in practice. Single drives actually manage to outperform the striped arrays some of the time, even.

If you're planning an upgrade and want to know whether to buy a couple of 128 GB drives and put them in RAID 0 or just grab a single 256 GB SSD, for example, the answer still seems clear enough to us: just grab the large drive and use one. Using Samsung's 840 Pros as an example, a pair of 128 GB drives will run you $300 on Newegg right now. The 256 GB model sells for $240 (maybe that's why it's out of stock currently). There's also the issue of reliability. If one drive in a RAID 0 configuration fails, the entire array is lost. At least for a primary system drive, one SSD on its own is safer.

There are of course exceptions. SATA 6Gb/s currently limits us to 500+ MB/s reads and sub-500 MB/s writes. Sometimes, that's just not enough. Just take those raw AVI captures mentioned earlier as an example. We use four Crucial m4s in RAID 0 to make sure we aren't dropping any frames. In a case like that, RAID 0 is a must-have, and the fact that only captured video resides on the array means that a failure would be a fairly superficial loss (except the cost of the drive). If you have an application like that, well, then you already know what you need, and you know that a large, single drive isn't going to get the job done.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-raid-benchmark,3485-13.html


However, if you insist on doing it, you might want to read THIS thread, because as far as I know, and I DO have the same board as you, it has mostly not been successfully done on the newer bios versions for that board. Seems some of the functionality was removed from the bios in newer versions according to what Gigabyte told me when I inquired about this and also the fact that there is no longer an F12 bios screenshot capability anymore. They said that in order to insert some other required instructions they had to remove others since they were limited to the bios being a specific size.

I don't know if that's factual for the RAID consideration, but it would certainly seem to make sense in light of what I've confirmed myself as far as lost capability after the F6 bios.

http://forum.gigabyte.us/thread/969/problem-recognizing-drives-update-z170xp

 

[Calvin7]

You should be selecting second option UEFI RAID Configuration and not EZ Raid.

Reboot and enter BIOS Setup again. Then enter the Peripherals\Intel(R) Rapid Storage Technology sub-menu.

On the Intel Rapid Storage Technology menu, press <Enter> on Create RAID Volume to enter the Create RAID Volume screen. Enter a volume name with 1~16 letters (letters cannot be special characters) under the Name item and press <Enter>. Then, select a RAID level. RAID levels supported include RAID 0, RAID 1,RAID 10, and RAID 5 (the selections available depend on the number of the hard drives being installed). Next, use the down arrow key to move to Select Disks.

Under Select Disks item, select the hard drives to be included in the RAID array. Press the <Space> key on the hard drives to be selected (selected hard drives are marked with "X"). Then set the stripe block size. The stripe block size can be set from 4 KB to 128 KB. Once you have selected the stripe block size, set the volume capacity.

After setting the capacity, move to Create Volume and press <Enter> to begin.

After completing, you'll be brought back to the Intel Rapid Storage Technology screen. Under RAID Volumes you can see the new RAID volume. To see more detailed information, press <Enter> on the volume to check for information on RAID level, stripe block size, array name, and array capacity, etc.

 

[Darkbreeze]

Even if that IS the issue, still a poor idea. There's little to be gained and much to potentially be lost by doing an SSD RAID, whether with SATA or NVME PCI M.2.

 

[USAFRet]

RAID 0 with 950 Pro's is even worse than with standard SATA SSD's.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/samsung-950-pro-256gb-raid-report,4449.html

tl-dr..."The 950 Pro has leveraged the technology so well that running two drives together just slows down the storage system. "

 

[RealBeast]

RAID 0 with 950 Pro's is even worse than with standard SATA SSD's.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/samsung-950-pro-256gb-raid-report,4449.html

tl-dr..."The 950 Pro has leveraged the technology so well that running two drives together just slows down the storage system. "

^ THIS.

Why do so many people feel the need to attempt to achieve higher benchmarks with no (or lower) performance advantage in the real world at the cost of data security?

 

[stueck9356]

Fair enough. I did not know those benchmarks existed, excuse my misunderstanding. I purchased a second one because I was running out of space on my 512GB, and buying a used second drive was the cheapest option to increase my space. I know I could have probably purchased a regular SSD for cheaper $/GB, however I prefer to have one single volume, not my data spread across two. More of a personal preference I guess, avoiding the need to deal with the simple headache of distributing my data over two drives. It wasn't that I wanted *the bestest fastest most awesomest hard drive solution*.

Raw speed was not my goal. I wanted a single large volume and I figured raiding two together would be my best bet.

I'm not worried about data security, everything important is on a NAS in RAID 1. And the last time I used RAID on a desktop was with some WD velociraptors like 10 years ago, so I didn't realize SSDs suffered in RAID.

Reading the reviews I realize that now my solution WILL be to just have two volumes and manage them independently. Even though my issue was sidetracked, thanks for the information.

 

[Darkbreeze]

So then, if that's the case, there are other ways to do it besides RAID. Spanned volumes and symbolic linking are two of them. RAID is of course still an option though, but other options can be read about here:

https://lifehacker.com/5986883/how-to-combine-multiple-hard-drives-into-one-volume-for-cheap-high-capacity-storage

Otherwise, perhaps Calvin7's information above will help. If not, we can certainly look into it further.

 

[localizethis75]

I'm in the same situation with myy z170 gaming 3. The difference is that I'm not looking to decide whether or not to use RAID 0. I actually alreaadh a RAID 0 setup with Bios F7. I upgrade to f22j and lost the array. Now I have no way of recuperating the RAID setup and accessing the data on that volume.

I don't care to use RAID 0 any more - I just want to retive my data! What can I do?

 

[USAFRet]

I'm in the same situation with myy z170 gaming 3. The difference is that I'm not looking to decide whether or not to use RAID 0. I actually alreaadh a RAID 0 setup with Bios F7. I upgrade to f22j and lost the array. Now I have no way of recuperating the RAID setup and accessing the data on that volume.

I don't care to use RAID 0 any more - I just want to retive my data! What can I do?

Please start a new thread for your particular situation.

(but a RAID 0 should never ever be run without an actual backup of the data)