# Soo RAID or AHCI?



## ZoneDymo (Aug 10, 2019)

I feel like im messing here with ancient lingering tech vs the establishment but I have a question non the less.

I want to have an SSD with my windows on it.
I also want 2 extra standard HDD's along side it in Raid 0 for my steam games etc.

Sooo what is best or...perhaps the only thing to do then?
Setup the mobo for AHCI and then combine the discs in Windows 10?

Or setup the mobo for Raid?... 

Again I feel like im comparing oranges and apples here but yeah, someone explain this to me.


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## newtekie1 (Aug 10, 2019)

RAID on the motherboard.


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## MrPotatoHead (Aug 10, 2019)

Hardware raid over software in Windows every time


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## TheLostSwede (Aug 10, 2019)

Don't mess with the chipset RAID, as if you change board, your RAID array might not work any more.
AHCI is obviously not going to give you RAID, but you can stripe a couple of drives in Windows.

Neither is "proper" RAID though. Keep in mind that both options will add CPU overhead. That said, the chipset RAID, less so, than striping in Windows.


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## eidairaman1 (Aug 10, 2019)

Get a Raid Card


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## newtekie1 (Aug 10, 2019)

TheLostSwede said:


> Don't mess with the chipset RAID, as if you change board, your RAID array might not work any more.



This is only an issue if you switch from Intel to AMD or vise versa. If you start on Intel and stick with Intel, the RAID will work with a new motherboard.

That said, it is a RAID-0, so obviously the data isn't important(or he'll have it backed up). So if he upgrades in the future and the RAID breaks, it shouldn't be a big deal. 

Of course, I wouldn't put games on a RAID-0 anyway unless you are just doing it for the space. It isn't going to give a noticeable improvement in performance when it comes to loading games.


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## TheLostSwede (Aug 10, 2019)

newtekie1 said:


> This is only an issue if you switch from Intel to AMD or vise versa. If you start on Intel and stick with Intel, the RAID will work with a new motherboard.
> 
> That said, it is a RAID-0, so obviously the data isn't important(or he'll have it backed up). So if he upgrades in the future and the RAID breaks, it shouldn't be a big deal.
> 
> Of course, I wouldn't put games on a RAID-0 anyway unless you are just doing it for the space. It isn't going to give a noticeable improvement in performance when it comes to loading games.



Not true. There have been times just upgrading your BIOS/UEFI has messed up RAID arrays. Maybe it has gotten better, but it's not something you can rely on.


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## ZoneDymo (Aug 10, 2019)

alright, so a lot more discussion then I expected heh.

so here is my question, this AHCI or Raid setup always seems to be for all harddrives attached.
I have yet to see a motherboard where you can set some up for raid while others in AHCI.
Im going to use a ASROCK B450 and that one does not seem to have separate options for Sata connections, its all this or all the other.

So if I do set it up for Raid, will that have no negative affect on the Windows SSD which has nothing to do with a Raid setup?


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## TheLostSwede (Aug 10, 2019)

ZoneDymo said:


> alright, so a lot more discussion then I expected heh.
> 
> so here is my question, this AHCI or Raid setup always seems to be for all harddrives attached.
> I have yet to see a motherboard where you can set some up for raid while others in AHCI.
> ...



Simply don't include some drives in the RAID array, it's that simple.
For RAID, you'll get a separate UI on boot and it will slow down the boot speed of your system, usually quite significantly.
Beyond the added boot time, there shouldn't be any negative effect.
However, make sure you install the OS with the RAID drivers, or you're going to have problems if you switch from AHCI to RAID all of a sudden. 
It's also a PITA to switch between the two, but not impossible.


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## newtekie1 (Aug 10, 2019)

TheLostSwede said:


> Not true. There have been times just upgrading your BIOS/UEFI has messed up RAID arrays. Maybe it has gotten better, but it's not something you can rely on.



Not anytime recently.  Intel for sure has put a lot of effort into making sure RAID support is pretty universal across versions.  Hell, I've pulled an array from a 775 945G machine and put it on a H170 machine.  Put the H170 in RAID mode, hooked up the drives, and the RAID array was recognized immediately.




ZoneDymo said:


> So if I do set it up for Raid, will that have no negative affect on the Windows SSD which has nothing to do with a Raid setup?



No.  The single SSD will act just like it is connected by AHCI.  However, you may have to load a RAID driver during Windows setup before Windows will recognize any drive connected to the SATA ports.  But it's no big deal really.



TheLostSwede said:


> For RAID, you'll get a separate UI on boot and it will slow down the boot speed of your system, usually quite significantly.



Have you used onboard RAID any in the past 5 years?  Because this is totally untrue.  Hell, in the past ~2 years, whenever I've enabled RAID in the UEFI setup, there no extra UI screen that pops up during boot.  Everything is configured through the UEFI setup.  And even when there was a separate UI during boot, if you did nothing it only added about 5 seconds to boot.

On the other hand, add-in cards can add a very significant amount of time.  My highpoint cards can take 30 seconds to initialize and find all the drives connected to them.



TheLostSwede said:


> It's also a PITA to switch between the two, but not impossible.



It's insanely easy with Win10.  You literally change it in the BIOS and boot Windows.  It will recognize the change and boot.


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## cucker tarlson (Aug 10, 2019)

eidairaman1 said:


> Get a Raid Card


why ???


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## Assimilator (Aug 10, 2019)

ZoneDymo said:


> Setup the mobo for AHCI and then combine the discs in Windows 10?



This is all you need. It will be the simplest, and likely fastest option for your desired configuration: https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/NVMe-RAID-0-Performance-in-Windows-10-Pro-1369/#Analysis

The only time you need motherboard RAID 0/1/10/01 today is for boot drives, when it's absolutely neccesary. For everything else use Windows' RAID, and if you are doing RAID-6, get a hardware RAID card (don't EVER do RAID-5, you will lose data and you will be sad).


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## biffzinker (Aug 10, 2019)

TheLostSwede said:


> Not true. There have been times just upgrading your BIOS/UEFI has messed up RAID arrays. Maybe it has gotten better, but it's not something you can rely on.


When I was using Intel's Smart Response I found out a BIOS update would break the RAID pairing of SSD cache drive to the hard disk drive unless you turned off Smart Response before updating.

Has Intel changed that with Optane as a cache drive?


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## newtekie1 (Aug 10, 2019)

Assimilator said:


> don't EVER do RAID-5, you will lose data and you will be sad



That's a rather baseless statement. RAID-5 is fine, you won't lose data by using it.

To give you an idea, servethehome's RAID reliability calculator with basically worst case figures, says 20 years before data loss will occur with a 3x6TB RAID5 array:





And, again, these are worst case.  Most drives have a much better NER than 10^6, most have a much higher MTBF, and the rebuild speed will almost definitely be a lot higher than 5MB/s.


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## Aquinus (Aug 10, 2019)

I know that this is for Linux, but something worth thinking about.
https://serverfault.com/questions/685289/software-vs-hardware-raid-performance-and-cache-usage

In this day and age, Fake RAID (for example, motherboard RAID solutions like Intel RST(e),) and _good_ software RAID are going to be very similar in performance and that the benefit of having a dedicated card more has to do with the dedicated cache than anything else in this day and age, but even then, that's for optimal write performance. The reality is that modern hardware is more than capable of handling RAID in the OS. I can't speak to Windows RAID though, but mdadm really isn't too bad these days in Linux.


Assimilator said:


> The only time you need motherboard RAID 0/1/10/01 today is for boot drives, when it's absolutely neccesary. For everything else use Windows' RAID, and if you are doing RAID-6, get a hardware RAID card (don't EVER do RAID-5, you will lose data and you will be sad).


I haven't lost any data with RAID-5 since I built my machine almost 8 years ago. 


TheLostSwede said:


> Not true. There have been times just upgrading your BIOS/UEFI has messed up RAID arrays. Maybe it has gotten better, but it's not something you can rely on.


Never happened to me. It would reset my BIOS, but switching back to RAID and RSTe always brought everything back for me.


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## TheLostSwede (Aug 11, 2019)

@newtekie1 I guess I stand corrected and no, I haven't used motherboard RAID in a long time.


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## shovenose (Aug 11, 2019)

Windows storage spaces if you have win10 pro.


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## Jetster (Aug 11, 2019)

RAID enables AHCI so when you set a motherboard to RAID any single drive not part of an array will be AHCI

And motherboard RAIDs are fine as long as its not stressing the chipset with a complicated array of drives and you back that stuff up


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## Aquinus (Aug 11, 2019)

Jetster said:


> And motherboard RAIDs are fine as long as its not stressing the chipset with a complicated array of drives and you back that stuff up


The only way that Fake RAID stresses the chipset is from the I/O, nothing more, nothing less. Running RAID or not makes no difference to the chipset. For RAID 5 or 6, parity calculations are still done on the CPU in this configuration. Fake RAID is like a software RAID that you can boot directly off of, but that's about it. It's really just a glorified software RAID.


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## Valantar (Aug 11, 2019)

shovenose said:


> Windows storage spaces if you have win10 pro.


I use Storage Spaces on my combo HTP/NAS, and it's worked beautifully - even through a drive replacement (I thought I had a dead drive, turned out to be a false alarm, but good to test anyhow). Also, drives configured in a storage space are automatically recognized as such when moved to any other W10 (pro at least) PC, which makes recovery trivial in case of a system failure. Incredibly easy to use, and seemingly very stable.


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## shovenose (Aug 11, 2019)

Valantar said:


> I use Storage Spaces on my combo HTP/NAS, and it's worked beautifully - even through a drive replacement (I thought I had a dead drive, turned out to be a false alarm, but good to test anyhow). Also, drives configured in a storage space are automatically recognized as such when moved to any other W10 (pro at least) PC, which makes recovery trivial in case of a system failure. Incredibly easy to use, and seemingly very stable.



I'm about to try the whole "moving it to another system" part because I'm separating my Plex server from my NAS vs having it all in a single PC. I've got 6x8TB HDDs and I'm going to simply set up the new NAS PC and connect all the drives to it and hope for the best LOL.

Performance-wise Storage Spaces is OK, write speeds on parity array is meh... but if you do a mirrored storage space or simple (no resiliency) space it's fast. Also if it's on a UPS the powerprotected flag can be applied in PowerShell (just Google/Bing that) and it doubled my write performance in my parity array (still not as good as a zfs raid5 though, I did a comparison on a separate PC albeit with different drives but close enough)


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## shovenose (Aug 17, 2019)

shovenose said:


> I'm about to try the whole "moving it to another system" part because I'm separating my Plex server from my NAS vs having it all in a single PC. I've got 6x8TB HDDs and I'm going to simply set up the new NAS PC and connect all the drives to it and hope for the best LOL.
> 
> Performance-wise Storage Spaces is OK, write speeds on parity array is meh... but if you do a mirrored storage space or simple (no resiliency) space it's fast. Also if it's on a UPS the powerprotected flag can be applied in PowerShell (just Google/Bing that) and it doubled my write performance in my parity array (still not as good as a zfs raid5 though, I did a comparison on a separate PC albeit with different drives but close enough)



Well, as an update, moving the drives from one Windows 10 PC to another was NO PROBLEM and everything was detected perfectly (though a reboot was required for it to see all the drives, no big deal). Unfortunately, I then installed Windows Server instead of Windows 10 and I learned the hard way you can't move storage spaces from a consumer OS (Win10) to a server OS (Server2019) so I had to delete all my data and start over. Woohoo :/


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## advanced3 (Aug 17, 2019)

Scrap those HDDs and just buy a 1tb SSD.


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## lexluthermiester (Aug 18, 2019)

advanced3 said:


> Scrap those HDDs and just buy a 1tb SSD.


Sorry mate, but that's just bad advice.

@ZoneDymo
I say get yourself an SSD that has a good amount of space, like a 500gb or 1TB(ish) and then use you HDD's for mass storage as spare drives.


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