I hate these sorta posts but I’m generally clueless on this sorta thing.
My workstation is a bit high test (R9 3900X, lotsa ram, multi GPU, etc etc) and I want fast storage on top of that. However, I’m unsure about using NVME in RAID. My motherboard supports it, but I’m unsure of what drives would be capable of raid.
I remember years ago with SATA SSD’s they would get burnt up from the constant writes. Do NVME drives have that issue?
Is NVME RAID even a good idea?
The reason I have interest in this is my MOBO has 2 M.2 slots, however I can only use both in RAID. I figure might as well use NVME since its there, and since I can, move game storage over to that. Then I’d be flying when it’d be time for Rust or CS with friends.
Yes, most (of the lower price / fast speed models) are still designed for mainly read operations. Have to dig a bit into the specs and find out what the TBW warranty is.
In a desktop, no. Just not enough lanes to really let the system fly. Are you thinking raid 0? I mean, it’ll be fast and if you’re just storing games / OS on it, nothing lost if either drive takes a dump. Just replace it, reinstall and back to work. Keep important stuff backed up somewhere else.
Raid 1 across two drives, what’s the point. You won’t see much improvement for reads, and writes will be slower (2x as much data to write.)
I don’t think these games have texture sets large enough for NVMe to make a difference past SATA SSD’s.
Something like COD might, but they just means you’d go from the matchmaking/party screen into game before your mates, and wait while their computers load in.
I always liked the Samsung 970 PRO. The 980 PRO Is out now and is PCIe 4.0, but I’m not sure if it is better or not since it switched to using a write cache and slower main flash.
That’s assuming that you write quite a bit.
Anyway, I figure RAID-0 is a good idea. If you used two drives without RAID and one failed you’re stuck reinstalling half your stuff. With RAID-0 you reinstall all of your stuff. I think it is the same hassle either way. And either way you should have a backup. Either an external HDD, internal HDD, or network drive. Or a cloud backup, but dang are those slow to restore from.
Flash drives in RAID only write when you write to them so I’m not sure what you mean by this. Unless you mean Linux MD RAID doing full drive writes when it initializes the arrays to zero? I don’t know if they ever patched that for SSDs although it was proposed to use TRIM instead, but you can also give the --assume-clean flag during setup to skip the zero-writes.
But yes NVMe drives which use Flash take damage every time you write to them just like SATA SSDs. The only difference in drives here is the interface: NVMe vs SATA.
One thing RAID can make worse is write amplification by not doing TRIM. I don’t know where the Windows drivers are at these days but in Linux most everything does TRIM passthrough on the simple RAID types like RAID-0 and RAID-1. You might have to check the parameter settings on the Linux driver modules to make sure TRIM passthrough is enabled.