Set up RAID

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greg15e602e6

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In addition to my main NVMe drive that running Windows 11 22H2, I have a second NVMe drive on my computer that has no partitions allocated. How do I set up a RAID-1 mirror using the Main NVMe as the initial source data which is then mirrored to the second NVMe?

I have an MSI PRO B650-P WIFI that has no "Windows OS Configuration" option under Settings/Advanced (why?), has SATA Mode set to RAID has Secure boot enabled. It is successfully running the Windows 11 Installation. While it is on a different menu that the documentation states, I do see a RAIDXpert2 Configuration Utility option. I found a RAIDXpert2 document that is long and complicated, but that doesn't help me accomplish this logically simple procedure.
 
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RAIDXpert2 should be the way to go, then you have to create a RAID array and add the two drives to it, but i think this usually has to happen before you install the OS.
What long document are you looking at?

Anyway, when you use a good SSD model, a sudden failure becomes very unlikely. Failure rates of a proper SSD are a fraction of a percent, making it the most reliable PC component that was ever sold (no exaggeration, they have proven that statistically). And for that minuscule eventuality, you just do regular backups. I've always been a proponent of "backups over RAID1", because a RAID1 does nothing about the much more common dangers such as user error, software mishaps, updates breaking something, and so on. This will all be immediately mirrored in a RAID1 and you have gained no extra security from it.

You can do backups as disk images or just user data, incremental or full backups, to an internal or external drive or several, manually or automated. This is all preferable over a RAID1 nowadays, especially external/offline backups stored away from the PC (which protect against a host of additional dangers that a RAID1 is helpless against).
 
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https://drivers.amd.com/relnotes/amd-raidxpert2_user_guide.pdf is the document I mentioned. I found a comment describing a problem I've been having and it confirms my feeling that my AMI UEFI firmware is bugged (in addition to it generally resisting rather than helping make changes; pity there isn't a competitive BIOS market). Since I suspect I would have to reinstall my OS, I will think about whether I want to use RAID or not with this motherboard. Thanks for your thoughts. They imply that RAID 1 doesn't provide any form of error checked redundancy/mirroring, meaning that one of the drives has to fail to make it worthwhile. However, part of the motivation for me to use RAID 1 is that is provides faster drive read speeds.
 
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Unless you have a very specific scenario that truly benefits from higher read speeds than what a fast M.2 PCIe SSD can deliver, then it's not worth it. The renowned "c't magazine" tested an NVMe RAID0 with four 980 PROs on a Threadripper workstation, and while the measured thruput increased massively, in real-life applications it wasn't any faster than a single fast Samsung 980 Pro. The article is in German and behind a paywall, but i have the magazine and i've read it in full. It has to do with access times and where the bottlenecks really are as to why it can't be much faster in real-life tasks. In most scenarios you can't make use of the high thruput, it's mostly good for nice benchmark numbers.

Yes, there is no kind of parity checking going on with a RAID1, it's just very simple mirroring. For something more advanced, you'd need RAID5 which requires three SSDs, which you can't use with your board. But that would just add complexity, and then your RAID itself can start to become a failure point, or at least very frustrating. Rebuilding a RAID5 can take forever (even with M.2 PCIe SSDs), because it depends more on how fast the parity information can be processed, which is often not very fast. Rebuilding a RAID5 is a complex XOR process to reconstruct the data from the good drives. At an assumed 100 MB/s, it would take almost three hours per TB, but at 10 MB/s, it would take more like 27 hours per TB. Again, has little to do with the drive's speed, more with how fast the rebuild can be processed. And the BIOS tends to not give any progress status, it will just show "Rebuilding". I've seen people on this forum stare at their BIOS screen for several days after some problem with their RAID5 array, because it would only show "Status: Rebuilding" and they're not sure how long it might take or wether to abort it.

And as i said, even a RAID1 is mostly useless with SSDs, let alone a RAID5. You can do that for large HDDs with loads of very important data on it (for which you should also have several backups), but for SSDs, it's pretty much nonsense. Backups for data safety, faster SSD for higher speeds.
 
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I'm trying to set up two RAID 1 arrays on the main PCIe x16 slot. It should be able to take four M.2 SSDs in an ASUS Hyper M.2 X16 PCIe 4.0 X4 Expansion Card (4x4x4x4 Gen 4) slot that is direct to the CPU. Apparently that makes it more than four times as fast as a two lane M.2 which is great because I an running a database server on it and it makes a big difference if the disks are fast. I can put the data on one array and the log files and backups on the other array. Unfortunately it will slow down writes but these tend to be less intensive. I am also maxing out with 128GB of RAM which should cash the database for most queries which might make the disk speed less important, we will see if I get it working! If it works it's a lot cheaper to use a Gaming PC.
 
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