SSD in Raid 0?

[martheli]

I have two samsung 960 evo PCIe NVMe M.2 250GB drives. I heard that putting them in raid 0 config boosts performance but you lose TRIM. Is that true? Is it worth the performance increase and can TRIM be used in raid 0? My motherboard is asrock extreme4 z370 with an i7 8700k.

 

[Pat Flynn]

TRIM still works for Intel Rapid Storage Technology. I'm currently running two SATA SSD's in Raid 0, and can confirm that Windows 10 reports that it is able to trim the drives ('Optimize' instead of defrag). As far as I know, the NVMe drives operate in the same fasion.

P.S.- There's some debate as to whether or not you'll really notice anything other than transfer throughput. IOPS will technically be higher, but if you're operating normal desktop user/client stuff (gaming/browsing/etc) and not running databases and stuff, you will not see an improvement in performance. Most desktop client/user environments don't exceed a queue depth beyond 2. You'll need to hit 8+ on your queue depth to really benefit from the increase.
Also, your boot time will be slightly longer as the RAID ROM will have to load before the OS.
You do however gain the convenience of having one storage volume instead of two. However, you also gain increased risk of failure (Raid 0)- if one drive fails, you lose all the data on both.

 

[theyeti87]

You will see no real improvement in read/write speeds in normal scenarios. Running benchmarks on the drives will yield larger numbers, but those won't translate into noticeable faster operation. Not sure about whether or not TRIM is lost in a RAID 0 configuration.

 

[geofelt]

Raid-0 has been over hyped as a performance enhancer.
Sequential benchmarks do look wonderful, but the real world does not seem to deliver the indicated performance benefits for most
desktop users. The reason is, that sequential benchmarks are coded for maximum overlapped I/O rates.
It depends on reading a stripe of data simultaneously from each raid-0 member, and that is rarely what we do.
The OS does mostly small random reads and writes, so raid-0 is of little use there.
In fact, if your block of data were to be spanned on two drives, random times would be greater.
There are some apps that will benefit. They are characterized by reading large files in a sequential overlapped manner.

Here is a older study using ssd devices in raid-0.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-raid-benchmark,3485.html
Spoiler... no benefit at all.