2 x 512GB M.2 SSD's - set up as RAID 0 or...

[art3mis]

Hi

Invested in 2 additional M.2 SSD's with the plan of setting them up in RAID 0 for high performance caching on a AMD X399 system.

However, the problem is that I already have an existing SSD in regular SATA configuration that is my primary linux work drive.

To use RAID, would need to switch from AHCI to RAID in my BIOs SATA settings, making my existing Linux drive unusable. Would need to reformat and reinstall everything from scratch.

 

So, my question is, Is it worth the extra hassle (RAID 0)?

Or should I simple use the additional M.2 SSDs as regular SATA drives for storage and caching?

I'm guessing the read write speeds of the M.2's are already fast enough for caching without RAID 0.

 

 

Edited December 21, 2017 by art3mis

[malexander]

For all the hassle that switching to RAID would entail, I wouldn't bother. Most of the time you're not going to see the transfer rates that m.2 RAID 0 would give you over a pair of regular m.2 drives. I was a little surprised that I couldn't find a PCI-Express x4 RAID card in online retailers that supported m.2 drives, but that'd probably be your least-hassle option if you really do need them RAID0.

[lukeiamyourfather]

If the M.2 SSD are SATA it might be worthwhile to deal with RAID to get the extra performance. Most M.2 drives on sale now are SATA, not NVMe. If they're NVMe then it's not worth while because they're already faster than an application could fully utilize anyway. If you're running Linux you could use ZFS on Linux to create a pool of them and bypass the motherboard RAID (which would probably be slower than ZFS on Linux anyway).

[art3mis]

Thanks. Yeah they are NvME (Samsung 960 Pro M.2). Will avoid RAID for now.