Mixed RAID arrays on Z97 Intel controller

[King107s]

I have an ASROCK Z97 Xtreme 9 board that has a current RAID array of HDD's for storage and I have a Samsung 840 Pro SSD that is running out of room...

I need to know if I can add a second RAID array by adding an additional SSD to the same controller.

I also need to know if having SSD's with different internal controllers will cause problems in RAID i.e. Samsung MDX with MJX like on the 840 vs 860 PRO. There is nothing wrong with my 840 PRO so i thought why not just RAID it with another of the same size rather than buying a bigger SSD and selling my old one for a loss.

 

[EarthDog]

I do not believe you can have mixed arrays on the same controller... but not 100% sure. If your board has additional ports driven by a 3rd party controller, you can do that.

Honestly, there is very little point in putting SSDs in RAID...

 

[King107s]

I do not believe you can have mixed arrays on the same controller... but not 100% sure. If your board has additional ports driven by a 3rd party controller, you can do that.

Honestly, there is very little point in putting SSDs in RAID...

Completely agree, was more just to continue to utilize the 840 and a bit of being a cheap ***. No big deal though I can just replace it with a bigger one.

 

[Nebulous]

On my Z270 I have 2 separate Raid Arrays (Raid-0) on the same controller. Sad part is I'm not sure if you can have 2 different raid arrays ( raid-0 & raid-1) on the same controller if that's what you're after.

 

[HankB]

If you have another SATA connector, is anything stopping you from adding a new drive to the existing drives? Give it another drive letter and just put some stuff there, no?

 

[King107s]

Anybody have info about this part of the post? "need to know if having SSD's with different internal controllers will cause problems in RAID i.e. Samsung MDX with MJX like on the 840 vs 860 PRO."

 

[EarthDog]

I believe it would just run at the speed of the slowest drive.

 

[Woomack]

Yes, you can set multiple arrays (max 6 SATA on these intel motherboards) and if you mix drives then it will work at the max speed of the slowest one. So if you have 450MB/s + 550MB/s then in theory it will run as 450MB/s in RAID1 and 900MB/s in RAID0 (in real it depends on more things).
If you set an array with 2 different capacity drives then it will be the capacity of the smaller one or x2 if you set RAID0. I bet you know that already.
All Samsung 8xx series can make similar max sequential transfers so I wouldn't worry about the performance. Random bandwidth for SATA drives is also not much different.

 

[DaPoets]

Yes multiple arrays is fine, but raided SSDs are unless unless you have a specific need for redundancy. I have used multiple raid configurations for 10+ years and drive speeds today are at the point where there is no real world performance advantage in speed except for a few use cases (multiple users accessing the same system & transferring large/numerous files often, AND/OR you just really need redundancy.

Raid takes up system resources as well so you need to really look at your daily tasks to think about if you need it today. When my old SSD outperformed my 4 hard drive raid-0 in my gaming rig it was clear the day of the raid setup was nearing it's end.