Check if the Z790 mainboard supports M.2-raid.
Check if the Z790 mainboard supports M.2-raid.
Hello, you're planning to switch to the 14th generation Intel processors and are interested in a solid mainboard such as the GIGABYTE Z790 AORUS Master. This board offers five M.2 slots—two with PCI 5.0 and three with PCI 4.0. Your inquiry is about setting up a RAID 0 configuration using two or more drives from the PCI 4.0 slots. It looks like the specs mention support for NVMe SSDs in RAID 0, 1, 5, and 10 modes, but you're wondering if you can use the PCI 4.0 slots for data paths without connecting them to the CPU or chipset. Your question is clear and well-structured—please feel free to ask for more details!
Are you referring to this storage device? What operating system are you running? Usually I recommend using software RAID, which allows you to combine any connected drives regardless of interface type. If you're using Fakeraid for Windows boot drives, you're limited to drives that match your chipset compatibility.
I'm configuring M.2 RAID 0 on a Z690 Unify-X board, which functions similarly to the Z790. You can connect the chipset lanes directly for full capability. There are BIOS settings that let you link the drive straight to the CPU or use SATA devices, though I haven't confirmed performance in this slot yet. Be aware the setup process is complex at best, and even on my board required multiple reboots to work properly. It's also not guaranteed to remain stable with future BIOS updates.
I won't use my boot drive. I'm planning to install on a 2TB PCI 5.0 slot—plenty for my system. For the rest, I need at least 8TB spread across four 4.0 slots. If a 2x4TB setup works, I'd prefer that. Maybe even 3x4TB if feasible. I've had issues with software RAID in Windows 10, got errors and the setup would fail often. That's why I'm considering hardware RAID. Has Windows 11 improved the software RAID option? I haven't tested it yet. It seems to disable RAID for me now. I'll need a reliable setup, so I might stick with software RAID. Thanks!
Just switching the BIOS switch on my board has broken my RAID 0 array twice. I just keep Steam games on it so it's not that big a deal if I lose the data, and there is some software that's pretty good at recovering it that has saved me from reinstalling everything, but it's far from something I'd recommend most people use. Only reason I'm willing to run this is because all my saves are in cloud backups and if something goes wrong I just have to redownload all my games from Steam (annoying and would take 2-3 days of straight downloading, but not the end of the world). Windows Storage Spaces (the software RAID within Windows) isn't perfect, performance does suffer a fair bit (you're limited to the performance of the worst drive in the array), though from what I know it's fairly reliable and doesn't just break out of no-where like Intel RAID tends to do. Ideally if you want software RAID you would use Linux, but without knowing your exact workload we don't know how feasible that would be.
Thanks for sharing your experience. The Linux-mdadm setup is quite effective on my home server, and I’m glad you’re satisfied with it. For my workstation, though, running Windows isn’t feasible due to storage proximity requirements. Moving data to a Linux server would be impractical given the size constraints. Windows Storage Spaces hasn’t seen much improvement either, and performance concerns are a dealbreaker for me. I think using separate 4TB drives and splitting the data across them would be the best solution for my needs. It’s not perfect, but it meets my requirements. I’m still using an older X99 board with six 500GB SATA drives in RAID 0, and it performs much better than a single drive. I haven’t updated the BIOS recently, but it’s working well. I was hoping for a similar setup with M.2 devices, but that hasn’t been possible yet. Thanks for your advice—I really appreciate it!
I would utilize storage spaces in Windows. It’s significantly superior to the motherboard RAID setup, and it should handle all your requirements smoothly. I have a configuration file for work servers that supports over 10GB/s reads without any problems. Properly configured, Storage Spaces performs excellently.
Taking this into account, I’ll give Storage Spaces another shot. If performance gets better, it will be clear from the beginning and reflected in the benchmarks. I can also put the system under stress later to check for stability. Have you experienced any stability problems with the latest updates or similar changes? Would a new release completely crash everything or cause some unexpected issues?
The system performs well and operates smoothly most of the time. Setting up storage spaces can be challenging, and PowerShell is essential for configuring the necessary settings to achieve optimal performance.