[SOLVED] Maximums XI Extreme: RAID 0 and RAID 1 at the same time

[player678]

Is it possible to configure two NVMe SSDs installed into motherboard slots (not into DIMM extension board) as RAID 0 and two SATA HDDs as RAID 1 at the same time?

The idea is to have two SSDs as the main drive (1-2 Tb each) as RAID 0 to have them both full capacity and for speed.

Two mirrored cheap(er) HDDs will be used to back up the main storage and for additional archive (4-8Tb each).

I would be grateful for any advice or concerns with the setup. Currently I have only 1Tb Samsung 970 Evo Plus, which is both small enough (with the current game sizes and I'd like it to be faster too... So I was thinking to either buy the second one, or to buy 2 x 2Tb and two HDDs for back up.

 

[USAFRet]

1. NVMe + RAID 0 is a useless situation in 99% of use case. It won't any "faster".
2. NVMe + HDD in RAID 1 (mirror) is a terrible idea. You get the speed of the slowest with the size of the smallest
3. RAID 1 is not a 'backup' of any sort.

Do not do this.

 

[player678]

1. NVMe + RAID 0 is a useless situation in 99% of use case. It won't any "faster".
2. NVMe + HDD in RAID 1 (mirror) is a terrible idea. You get the speed of the slowest with the size of the smallest
3. RAID 1 is not a 'backup' of any sort.

Do not do this.

Sorry, I think I explained not clearly enough. I consider having two SSDs in RAID 0 and two HDDs in RAID 1 at the same time, not SSD and HDD in one RAID.

HDD will be used as a backup storage. Why is it a bad idea?

Also, why two SSDs in RAID 0 won't get faster? I think they would - what am I missing?

 

[USAFRet]

Sorry, I think I explained not clearly enough. I consider having two SSDs in RAID 0 and two HDDs in RAID 1 at the same time, not SSD and HDD in one RAID.

Right.
OK, I took it as a RAID 0 (SSD) mirrored with the HDD's.

Still, the SSD's in RAID 0 gains you only complexity and fail potential. You'll not see any user facing speed benefit.

RAID 1 on the HDD's? Again, RAID 1 is not a backup.
It is useful if you actually need 24/7 uninterrupted ops, in the event of a physical drive fail. It does nothing for all the other pathways to data loss. Virus, accidental deletion, ransomware, etc, etc.

 

[player678]

Still, the SSD's in RAID 0 gains you only complexity and fail potential. You'll not see any user facing speed benefit.

I understand that it increases the probability of failure. Why won't it give speed benefit? While for sequential read/write it approaches PCI 3.0 limit, for random access it is much slower (300-500Mb/s). As RAID 0 does striping across two drives it should give substantial speed increase for random read/writes. What am I missing?

RAID 1 on the HDD's? Again, RAID 1 is not a backup.
It is useful if you actually need 24/7 uninterrupted ops, in the event of a physical drive fail. It does nothing for all the other pathways to data loss. Virus, accidental deletion, ransomware, etc, etc.

I didn't consider RAID 1 as backup from one HDD to another - I am considering backing up from SSDs to HDDs. I also understand that it won't protect for all scenarios and I still would back up to the cloud. But having backups locally would make recovery from any of two SSDs failure much faster than downloading from the cloud, plus I won't backup everything to the cloud.

So, I am not convinced it's such a bad idea The question was also about technical possibility to configure two RAIDs on a single Maximus XI motherboard or whether it would require additional controllers? And if it is possible whether it would have any side effects?

 

[USAFRet]

In the RAID 0 SSD, you're missing the overhead of the whole RAID thing.

With HDD's, yes, a RAID 0 did increase the overall speed.
With SSD's, especially NVMe drives, it does not.
The benchmarks can look huge, but the actual user facing performance is lacking.
In some instances, it can be even slower than individual drives.

Tests from a few years ago.
SATA III SSD + RAID 0:
https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-raid-benchmark,3485.html

NVMe SSD + RAID 0:
https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/samsung-950-pro-256gb-raid-report,4449.html

 

[USAFRet]

As for backing up...kudos to you for being proactive with this. Far too many are not (until 5 minutes after they need it)
RAID 1 or individual HDD's would work.

Read here for my backup routine:

What is your backup situation at home?

What is your backup situation at home? And if you don't do that, why not? Every single day, I read multiple threads here of "How do I get my stuff back?" or "That drive had 5 years of photos of my kids!!" Be it a dead drive, dropped phone, virus, accidental deletion, formatting the wrong...

forums.tomshardware.com

 

[player678]

Thank you

Great post about backups, I am now thinking about NAS too - the added benefit is you can hide it elsewhere for the theft scenario

For a bit more paranoid backup plan you’d need double the size in NAS (to fit 2 full images) and then some for increments and also 2 USB drives in case you lose one during the backup (if you’re thinking about malicious scenarios).

That thread is closed - couldn’t find how backup from NAS works there? Is it supported by NAS OS? Getting really off topic here

So it does seem that RAID 0 won’t make any games load much faster... So possibly I’ll just swap the main drive to a larger one.

 

[USAFRet]

I've changed/updated the drives in or attached to the NAS since then, but the basic premise still holds.
Automated and tested.

Automated:
On a regular schedule. Don't have to think about it.

Tested:
However you do it, does it actually work, and do you know how to recover?
I've seen many instances, both individuals and companies, that put something in place and never test it.
When a problem happens, they find out that some critical piece of the procedure has been missing for months, and their routine simply does not work.

I actually had to recover from a dead drive last December.
960GB SSD, died. Poof, gone. No warning. 605GB data on it.

Put in a new drive, click click in Macrium....all 605GB recovered, exactly as it was at 4AM when that drive ran its nightly backup.

 

[popatim]

For Intel at least, the M2's go thru the PCH which only has a 4 lane highway to the CPU - this becomes the limiting bandwidth factor.