Question RAID setup issue on X570 Aorus motherboard

[vishnumrao]

I have an AMD system with Gigabyte X570 Aorus MB. I have been running Ubuntu for the longest time on a single M.2 SATA SSD. Now I want to dual boot and I had a couple of identical SATA 6 Gbps 120 GB SSDs lying around. I chose to go RAID0 to get better performance.

I set up the RAID0 using the instructions provided on the Gigabyte support pages. But somehow the Windows installer does not see the RAID0. Even when booting Ubuntu, the RAI0 is not seen, but the drives are seen as individual 120GB SSDs.

Anyone have this experience? Any thoughts on solutions?

TIA, V.

 

[Lutfij]

I had a couple of identical SATA 6 Gbps 120 GB SSDs lying around
Make and model of your SSD's?

X570 AORUS ELITE (rev. 1.0) Support | Motherboard - GIGABYTE Global

Lasting Quality from GIGABYTE.GIGABYTE Ultra Durable™ motherboards bring together a unique blend of features and technologies that offer users the absolute ...

www.gigabyte.com

There's an AMD RAID Preinstall Driver that you're going to need to move forward with the OS installation.

With all due respect, I think you'd be best served just installing Windows OS one one drive as opposed to having it on a RAID0 array which is a lot of work to get minimal speed increments. The other option would be source a cheap NVMe drive and have the OS on that.

Out of curiosity, which X5709 Aorus board do you have? BIOS version for your motherboard?

 

[lantis3]

Both Intel & AMD's on board raid are called software raid or fake raid for a reason. There are no hardware chip on the motherboard to support real raid, it's driven only by software driver.

If the power (adapter) to the disk ever drops a bit, your data very likely will be screwed. Don't use raid 0 unless the data on it is disposable.

Have 2 small extra ssd disks? Make it triple boot to experiment different environment. I'll use 3rd one to play with Ventoy.

Or you can create a 240GB raid 0 (stripe) volume in Ubuntu if you really want to (not using raid 0 setup in BIOS) and create virtual machines on the volume using VM environment like VMware Workstation 17.x or Virtualbox 7.x, both are free. No dual/triple boot required.

 

[vishnumrao]

I had a couple of identical SATA 6 Gbps 120 GB SSDs lying around
Make and model of your SSD's?

X570 AORUS ELITE (rev. 1.0) Support | Motherboard - GIGABYTE Global

Lasting Quality from GIGABYTE.GIGABYTE Ultra Durable™ motherboards bring together a unique blend of features and technologies that offer users the absolute ...

www.gigabyte.com

There's an AMD RAID Preinstall Driver that you're going to need to move forward with the OS installation.

With all due respect, I think you'd be best served just installing Windows OS one one drive as opposed to having it on a RAID0 array which is a lot of work to get minimal speed increments. The other option would be source a cheap NVMe drive and have the OS on that.

Out of curiosity, which X5709 Aorus board do you have? BIOS version for your motherboard?

I had seen that as part of the instructions provided on the Gigabyte support page. I was already doing that step of loading the preinstall driver. But no luck early on.

I have have the latest F32d version of the BIOS. My MB is the X570 AORUS MASTER

I did solve the issue accidentally. Originally when I was trying to install, I accidentally wiped out my Ubuntu installation. I had to reinstall Ubuntu on my M.2 SSD. Since i did not want to mess up my new Ubuntu install on the M.2 SSD, I removed it prior to trying anything with WIndows.

This somehow resolves the issue. I was able to detect the RAID0 after the preinstall driver was loaded.


Now to your recommendation against RAID0. More than speed, its the desire to have a single larger filesystem that drove me to RAID0. I have very little data on the systems. All my data is always on my home NAS. Even if I hose my OS, I can just reinstall it.

WRT buying a NVMe drive - I don't really need top speed or the newest features. When I have two SSDs lying around, why not just use it?

 

[USAFRet]

I chose to go RAID0 to get better performance.

With solid state drives, that is mostly a false hope.

 

[vishnumrao]

Both Intel & AMD's on board raid are called software raid or fake raid for a reason. There are no hardware chip on the motherboard to support real raid, it's driven only by software driver.

If the power (adapter) to the disk ever drops a bit, your data very likely will be screwed. Don't use raid 0 unless the data on it is disposable.

Have 2 small extra ssd disks? Make it triple boot to experiment different environment. I'll use 3rd one to play with Ventoy.

Or you can create a 240GB raid 0 (stripe) volume in Ubuntu if you really want to (not using raid 0 setup in BIOS) and create virtual machines on the volume using VM environment like VMware Workstation 17.x or Virtualbox 7.x, both are free. No dual/triple boot required.

Yup, aware that its a fake raid. For me its not about speed. more about convenience of single large filesystem.

Ventoy: I will check it out.

VM is a good suggestion. But to try that I still will need to have a large filesystem to sustain two OSes.


BTW the RAID0 as per their instructions for this MB will work only on 2.5" SATA SSDs and cant include the M.2 SATA SSD.

 

[USAFRet]

will need to have a large filesystem to sustain two OSes

That is easily solved with just a larger drive.

Why not just put each OS on its own physical drive?

 

[vishnumrao]

With solid state drives, that is mostly a false hope.

Now that I am thinking more about my motivation for RAID0, its more about getting a single large filesystem than speed. Ofcourse more speed is better.

As noted in prevvious response, I was able to solve it and I can hit about 900 MBps RW speeds. This is certainly better than just running 1 single drive. So I am not disappointed.

 

[USAFRet]

Now that I am thinking more about my motivation for RAID0, its more about getting a single large filesystem than speed. Ofcourse more speed is better.

As noted in prevvious response, I was able to solve it and I can hit about 900 MBps RW speeds. This is certainly better than just running 1 single drive. So I am not disappointed.

That 'speed' is only seen in artificial benchmarks.
NOT in actual daily use.