Creating raid for NVMe drives?

I'm booting off a standard SATA SSD. I want to raid 2 NVMw drives together for game installs.

What's the best way to do this? The bios is set to the default AHCI UEFI (windows 10). I don't think I want to switch that, as my single SSD for the system drive is already installed. But where do I go to create a raid array for the data partition I want to create?

Thanks in advance!

(P870DM)

 

I went ahead and tried Windows Raid 0 and get about 3500MB/s sequential read and 2000MB/s write. Doesn't seem too slow or use any CPU so will probably just use this.

 

If you don't intend to boot them then that's the easiest way to be fair, the overhead should be similar for Raid 0.

 

wait a moment, which disks exactly do you have?

 

256GB Samsung 950 Pros M2 NVMe.

 

you will need to do this:

1) Backup all your data to an external HDD

2) Download the latest RAID INF Drivers, extract the folder, and place that folder on your Windows USB Flash Disk (these are the latest drivers v14.8.0.1042 which I have downloaded from CLEVO and uploaded them for you as the CLEVO servers suck)

3) Enter BIOS and change the BIOS mode from AHCI to RAID

4) Save and exit, then enter BIOS immediately

5) You will now find an Intel Rapid Storage menu somewhere, enter it, then create a RAID 0 Array from your 2 NVMe SSDs with a stripe size of 16K which works best for the OS/boot drive and is what Intel recommends for SSDs.

6) Turn off your laptop, open it, and disconnect both 2.5" SSDs as we only wanna have the drive(s) that we are installing Windows on otherwise Windows will place the boot files on the second drive which you don't want at all!

7) Insert your Windows Flash disk and boot off it

8) When you reach to the Windows partitions selection screen, you will notice that no drives are detected, just click browse to load the IRST driver, then navigate to your USB Flash disk and browse to the RAID Driver that you should have copied earlier then wait for it to load the driver which will take about 30 secs. After that, you will be able to see your RAID Array

9) Click on create, and specify the partition size you want, I usually do 200 GB for Windows and the rest for the second partition but at this stage, only create ONE partition with the size you want

10) When you are in Windows, go ahead and create the second partition using Disk Management in Windows

 

Thanks Phoenix - I grabbed all your drivers earlier and was wondering what that RAID one was for. I may try this at some point.

Your repository was very helpful in doing a system reset the first day I received the unit. I had gotten to a place where the system was blue screening on an KERNEL_SECURITY_CHECK something or rather or a IRQ_LESS_THAN sometimes which I think was related to the Killer 1535 (I had just turned on their adaptive feature and rebooted and even uninstalling the killer stuff couldn't get back to a running state). A reset and the latest drivers had everything working. But the reset removes all installed drivers - just the Windows 10 ones were left so I grabbed all yours and was good to go, and everything working much better - never came up again! In fact the latest Killer drivers work really well for QOS - I'm able to saturate my connection and still get low pings in games which I wasn't earlier.

 

that's the reason I avoid anything that has the name Killer/Qualcomm in it, great hardware spoiled by a clown of drivers team.

If you ever do get a BSOD again, try this, uninstall the entire killer suite and manually install the driver only by pointing to the location of the drivers folder only, for example, in my case it is

D:\Drivers\Clevo P870DM-G\Drivers\1.05.02\Options\01_WLAN\Killer\WLAN\drivers\Production\Windows10-x64\k1535w10