Non - OS raid 0

I have already 2 msata ssd's and then one 2.5 ssd for the OS. (p157sm)
In addition I have 1 WD mobile blue and I have now ordered 1 more for placing in a caddy (optical bay).
The plan is to set up the two wd blue's in "hardware" raid 0 through the bios. I am already running in uefi mode, and I must change my sata mode in bios to raid mode.
But what exactly is the procedure following the settings in bios ? I do not want to touch my boot configuration and I am afraid of proceeding before I am certain of what to do.

As for the upcoming two Blue's in raid 0, I back up every day and I am not worried about loosing my data - at all.

If anyone could help me out I would be very appreciative Thanx!

 

Honestly I would not mess with BIOS fakeraid unless you are using the drives to boot.

Use disk management to set up a striped volume in Windows for the two drives. Here's a video, it doesn't get any easier, just make sure to use GPT format instead of MBR.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2XBgQwJ2e9o

Using software RAID, you don't have to change anything in the BIOS and Windows manages the volume. You also avoid the annoyances and blue screens that Intel's Rapid Storage Technology drivers can cause and the performance difference isn't really there (IRST is still software RAID after all).

 

Great Thank you very much ! All I am really interested in is higher sequential speed. Much obliged.

 

just a quick follow-up question : There is a raid driver for windows 8.1 in the clevo download page. Is this the Intel RST raid driver ? And if so is that driver utilized for the bios fakeraid ? Or is there an option of Intel software raid through Windows ?
Appreciate your responses

 

You would still need the bios switched to raid mode and then you would need to edit your windows install to run in raid mode rather than AHCI which would require some registry changes.

 

All you need is to use disk management to turn the two drives into a striped drive with a GPT partition. It simulates raid 0 and requires nothing else. It's the best way to go if you are using raid on storage drives because you don't have to change Windows to get it to boot after the change while raid will require driver changes. There is really no benefit to fakeraid when you are doing storage drives, just the potential to mess up your Windows install and have to fix it.

Sent from my HTC One_M8 on Tapatalk

 

Thanx to both of you What is the difference between using disk management for a striped drive & making a simple volume or raid equivalent in "storage spaces" ? I have reinitialized both drives to GPT, of course now they are empty, and should I just try out both solutions for speed and usability you think ? Or is one clearly preferable over the other ?


Update: Ok, so I set up a striped volume in disk management with 2 x wd blue 1tb, and I turned off buffer flushing. I get sequentials now around ~200MB/s. Since larger type incompressible files are primarily my daily point of use for the disks I am really very happy with that, since I only saw around and below 100 MB/s for a single disk. That reminds me - I have to change my signature....

2 Update: Picked up some pointers here and there... Found an estimated drop-off point for read/write max performance for my disks, made a striped volume of 400 GB for speed and made a spanned volume for the rest. That way I can extend that volume or shrink it if I choose to, and play around to find my sweet spot for performance on the striped volume.
The problem here seemed to be that certain parts of the platters give lower write-speeds in particular, and also considering these hdd's have three platters per disk. So writing 200GB to each disk for a combined 400GB makes up a fast-transfer alternative for me for now. It seems to work well, the sequentials do not seem to drop off now, besides on the spanned volume. That is a bit irritating though, because I now use that spanned volume for temporary backup of my virtual machine - msata ssd's and iiiit iiiiss sloooooooow. I did a couple of backup tests to the striped volume, and that was a totally different story... Oh well