You going to have 4 m.2 drives + a HDD? I don’t see a need to put your OS into Raid 0 (risk>reward imo) and why would you invest in a local Raid 1? I guess my point being, if this laptop’s only function is gaming. SSD (nvme upgrade) for OS and HDD (2 TB SSD upgrade) for storage. Then have a proper off laptop backup.
2 m.2 and 2 sata i think, not sure how well that will work since m.2 will be 1 off chip and 1 off chipset pretty sure? also the 2 sata would be off chipset so slamming all of them at once would be kinda rough.
My comment more or less is questioning the need for 5 drives in a laptop. I want to either understand the OP’s use case better or recommend an alternative.
Raid 0 SSD’s for OS = 2 drives
Raid 1 NVMe = 2 drives
HDD = 1 drive
TOTAL = 5 drives
@TCE_Nomad, am I interpreting your configuration correctly? Looks like you have a beast setup otherwise. Can you elaborate on your use case? I also want to make sure you don’t find the Home Edition of Windows limiting. There are some nice features with a Professional license I don’t want you to find out that you are lacking.
It’s a 500gb SSD for OS in a raid 0, and a Hard Drive in a raid 1. Sorry if it may seem confusing. What do you mean by use case? What else does processional offer?
Honestly it really depends if you plan on doing things other than gaming with your laptop. If all you want to do is gaming then:
Go with a 1080/1440; 144Hz screen over 4k. The higher refreshrate will generally provide a better gaming experience for the screen size of the laptop than 4k
CPU doesn’t need to be a desktop grade CPU to game well. The 8750H is plenty good
RAM: 16gb of RAM is plenty unless you’re the type that never closes chrome
Hard Drives: A single Samsung 960/970 EVO for a main NVMe drive would be plenty speedy; you’re not going to reasonably gain anything for gaming out of having multiple NVMe drives in RAID 0. For high capacity flash for secondary storage, I’d say go with the Micron 1100 2TB drive over the Samsung 860 EVO. Save yourself a good chunk of money
When I refer to use case, I’m asking what you plan to do with your laptop. Do you plan to primarily game or more productivity focused work? That leads me to why you are interested in Raid arrays…
Raid 0 would require two drives to accomplish. 1/2 the data on A disk and 1/2 the data on B disk. This allows the CPU to write to both A and B simultaneously effectively doubling the speed. Problem is, if either disk A or B go down all will be lost.
Raid 1 also requires 2 drives. Both disk A and B get the same data. So it effectively 1/2s the storage space. Raid 1 is beneficial if always having your data accessible is paramount. It is however no substitute for backup. (Losing your laptop is losing all data)