Nvme M.2 drives =raid-0

[Nebulous]

I was having little issues with the WD Black SN850 500gb drive, so I decided to replace it with the Crucial P5 Plus 500gb. I ran CDM and right off the bat was very impressed with the reads/writes of the Crucial drive

FEATURED - What did you get today?

New chair, anda seat jungle 2 A little cramped, and foot rest is a joke but it was free and cosidering I was coming from a 12 year old $30 staples office chair, cant complain too much

www.overclockers.com

I was bored and decided to check the SN850 drive and flashed the firmware on it. Secure erased and ran CDM. Reads/writes are back to normal. Figured why not raid them and see what happens. Getting NVME raid to work using AMD's RAIDXpert2 to work was a real 'effing pita to say the least. Took me 3 hours to finally get it to work (what a pain in the bleep!).


So after hours of trying to raid these M.2 drives, ran CDM and this is what I got. Not too shabby!

 

[EarthDog]

Those reads though. Wow!

 

[Nebulous]

Those reads though. Wow!

Yeah, right?

 

[Robert17]

Wow, Neb, looking like PCIe 6 already. Did you check the temps? And what took most of the 3 hours?

 

[Nebulous]

Wow, Neb, looking like PCIe 6 already. Did you check the temps? And what took most of the 3 hours?

Thanks Robert! The 3 hours was spent creating the array, saving, then upon installing os, had to search for the specific drivers. I was under the impression it was only 1 specific driver. Turns out I had to install 3 of them back-to-back, and then the array was recognized. I was going thru drivers left at right trying to figure out which one. After like 2 1/2 hours of trying, I got on my tablet and checked MSI's forums. Found several people who had the same problem I was having. Finally saw a post of someone who stated there was 3 drivers that had to be install in succession. He even had a quick guide of which driver in which order. The rest was easy peasy. Man the days of installing a simple driver to enable raid are long over!

 

[Nebulous]

Ooops, forgot to add temps on the drives are around 40-ish. I'm going to have to replace the thermal pads soon because when I removed the sinks to swap out the drives, there was oily residue. And of course you can only use these pads once maybe twice and they get mashed to a point they don't make proper contact with the sink resulting in poor cooling.

 

[Blackstar]

Ooops, forgot to add temps on the drives are around 40-ish. I'm going to have to replace the thermal pads soon because when I removed the sinks to swap out the drives, there was oily residue. And of course you can only use these pads once maybe twice and they get mashed to a point they don't make proper contact with the sink resulting in poor cooling.

Does this mean you'll be able to load UT 2004 BEFORE you click on the icon now?

 

[Blaylock]

Thanks Robert! The 3 hours was spent creating the array, saving, then upon installing os, had to search for the specific drivers. I was under the impression it was only 1 specific driver. Turns out I had to install 3 of them back-to-back, and then the array was recognized. I was going thru drivers left at right trying to figure out which one. After like 2 1/2 hours of trying, I got on my tablet and checked MSI's forums. Found several people who had the same problem I was having. Finally saw a post of someone who stated there was 3 drivers that had to be install in succession. He even had a quick guide of which driver in which order. The rest was easy peasy. Man the days of installing a simple driver to enable raid are long over!

Any chance you could link the post that stated how to do this? If not maybe list what drivers were needed and what order in case one of us decided to attempt this too.

TIA

 

[Woomack]

Drivers are in every download section for every motherboard that supports it. It's just hard to figure it out at first without reading the manual. Most motherboards have a separate "how to" manual for RAID.
In short, enable RAID in BIOS. Get drivers from mobo manufacturer's website or AMD website if you have AMD mobo -> https://www.amd.com/en/support/chipsets/amd-socket-am4/x570 (the same drivers for all chipsets) -> AMD RAID Driver (SATA, NVMe RAID), and use drivers during the Windows installation. AMD has 3 drivers which you have to use (RAID, bus, and one more), so if you pick the wrong file then try again with another one. When the drive appears on the list then you used the correct driver
If you have an Intel motherboard then Windows should have drivers built-in. If not then every motherboard manufacturer has a driver pack in the download section and a description in the user's manual.

 

[Nebulous]

Any chance you could link the post that stated how to do this? If not maybe list what drivers were needed and what order in case one of us decided to attempt this too.

TIA

Can't seem to find it. From what I remember:

for X570 AMD

1) Create windows USB
2) D/l Raid drivers from mobo site (zipped)
3) Unzip raid drivers folder to windows USB
4) Go into bios and select WIN USB 1st boot device
5) Enable raid in bios and go to RaidXpert2
6) Create Array, save and reboot
7) Boot to Windows USB

This is where it gets tricky:

In windows installation, you won't see the array, so this is when you have to load the raid drivers

Select "Load Drivers" from windows install. ( This is where you unzipped the raid drivers folders) There are 3 folders you gotta look for:

NVMe_CC
NVMe_DID
RAID_SATA

Each folder has 3 folders and inside:

rcbottom
rccfg
rcraid

Select folder RAID_SATA. Open each folder and install files: rcbottom, rccfg & rcraid

Once these files are installed, then you will see the array and install windows as usual.

I might have forgot a step, but you get the gist. You won't see the array during windows install unless you install the 3 files first.


Another thing to note: If you select a folder and you don't see the driver pop-up, you selected the wrong folder. This was the problem I kept running into, so I had to keep going back and forth to find the right driver pop-up. Also I kept installing only 1 file and this was another issue I was having. This is why it took me 2 1/2 hours to try and figure out.

I'll keep looking for the guide and post it up once I find it.

 

[Pinky]

Make sure to use Acronis or some other backup software so you don't have to fresh install windows / jump through all those hoops again. You know at some point yer gonna nerf that bad boy up.

 

[Nebulous]

Acronis or any other back-up/copy software never works for me. I tried so many times and can never get it to work. I'm forced to do it the old fashioned way.

 

[Pinky]

Acronis or any other back-up/copy software never works for me. I tried so many times and can never get it to work. I'm forced to do it the old fashioned way.

There's really two facets to using something like Acronis... installing the software and running the full backup to a usb drive from within windows, on a schedule; and burning the appropriate ISO to disc or a bootable thumb drive (using something like Rufus) for disaster recovery later. I'm running a $20 licensed copy of Acronis from 2017 on my Windows 10 computer, and it saved my arse just a couple weeks ago when my 8 year old data drive went from buggy to dead in 2 days. The tech behind doing the shadow copy (taking the 'image' Acronis uses for full recovery) hasn't changed much since Windows 7. Helps to keep secure boot off, use GPT and UEFI, which I assume with 6TB drives you're already doing. Secure boot can complicate the recovery process.

The important thing is to have as new as possible version of the boot disk, to ensure it will mount your hard drive or raid controller when you need to recover. Older disks on newer hardware might not have the necessary drivers.

 

[Nebulous]

I tried several ways to use Acronis and every time I was rewarded with a donut. I think I got my Acronis from an NVME drive I bought. I tried cloning from raid to another raid and it didn't work. I also tried cloning from a single os drive to another. Again it didn't work. I even tried Macrium, that didn't work either.

After several hours of that torture, I just went ahead and did it the old way. Took a while, but I got it done. Only thing I do as a back-up is do a system restore point. If that gets nuked, well guess it sucks to be me

 

[EarthDog]

Macrium Reflect (free).

 

[Pinky]

Macrium Reflect (free).

Or Clonezilla.

Post magically merged: Oct 27, 2022

The important thing is to have as new as possible version of the boot disk, to ensure it will mount your hard drive or raid controller when you need to recover. Older disks on newer hardware might not have the necessary drivers.

This is likely the issue you had in the past Neb, the bootable media need to know how to mount the controller and may have not had the drivers. Never versions and newer motherboards use more ubiquitous controllers that these bootable tools can usually communicate with. I'd encourage you to try again, but it's a matter of your time having value or not, and the frequency of reinstalls. If you don't think it's broken, then certainly no reason to fix it. And with the amount of prOn and warez on your machine it's sanitary for a fresh slate every hour or two.

 

[Nebulous]

Actually I washed my hands of all the cloning software. Like I said, I do it the old fashioned way. Yeah, takes a bit more time, but it's not like I got a woman to run to

And I'll ask you to keep your hands away from my pr0n!