Amd hardware raid vs storage pools

Hardware Hub Storage
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I understand raid on a basic level, but have only deployed it a couple times with mixed results. This is not critical data and this array gets backed up to a nas onsite and offsite. I’m using a x670e gigabyte aorus master that has 4 m2 slots. The top slot is using a gen5 crucial drive for the OS and programs. The second m2 slot is gen4x4 thru the cpu lane, the other 2 m2 slots are gen4x4 through the chipset.

I have 3 crucial p3 plus 4TB drives I would like to use spanned together and get a nice performance boost. RAID0 is fine, since it’s getting backed up and it’s not critical data (mostly movies, tv shows, pictures, music, ebooks, games ETC.

Is AMD hardware raid through the motherboard the best option? Or should i look into storage pools? Is there other windows based raid options?

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Welcome!

Not to be too pedantic but I wouldn’t classify AMD’s motherboard level raid as hardware raid, I’d put it under the category of “fake raid” and I would avoid using it if possible, even most software raid solutions are better than it.

Windows storage spaces could be an option for you, it can stripe or span data across those three drives but you won’t get a large performance increase. There are many other software raid solutions for Windows but I wouldn’t recommend any of them due to their bug surface and lack of development.

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Is there any real performance benefit to striped PCIE 4.0 x4 drives when they’re both going through the same PCIE 4.0 x4 chipset link?

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AMD RAID is way better than Storage Spaces.
Storage Spaces is a buggy mess and performs pretty poor.

But poor performance also applies to AMD. See stuff like this.

Save yourself some pain and don’t use RAID.
RAID is probably only useful if you use HDDs.
You won’t see a performance gain by using RAID over SSDs.

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At like 26TB now

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Perhaps for performance, but I’ve seen so many RAIDXpert2 installs corrupt or “forget” themselves that I don’t recommend it anymore.

The problem I have with Storage Spaces is that Microsoft will sometimes change the major version of Storage Spaces itself and it breaks compatibility with pools created on a pervious version of Storage Spaces; this also makes it harder to develop good recovery software software for it, but even with all this it’s better than most other options on Windows.

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Is storage spaces even supported on normal Windows 11?
I thought that they gave up after Windows 10 and only support it for Windows Server and Windows Enterprise?

Anyway, it is trash.

I don’t know what OP is trying to achieve, but if it is just performance for gaming, a RAID will do more damage than good.

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I was under the impression that all Windows versions supported storage spaces, but in some of stripped down versions they took away the GUI for creating them. No one should be using the GUI to create them anyways.

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I tried to use Windows Storage Spaces back when I was Chia farming and it’s stripped array was constantly crashing and corrupting itself when running the plotter (high intensity extended write heavy workload). This was using dual PCIe 3 nvme drives, under Windows 10 Enterprise in ~2021. I haven’t tried it since but that experience left me with a bad impression of it.

These days I just use mergerfs for combined volume across HDD and don’t bother with any array for SSD since the speeds are fast enough even at PCIe 3.0 x4

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