15 R2 2 x Samsung SM951 in RAID 0

For those wondering, 2x Samsung SM951 256GB M.2 SSD, in a RAID 0 performs as seen below

 

Very nice. Thanks for sharing.

 

Which RAID is this? Hardware or software?

 

hardware

 

Hi, Just wondering, I tried a raid setup earlier but the windows setup wouldn't find the volume (diskpart didn't see anything either). How did you get yours working?

 

If you dont mind installing a fresh new copy of windows 10

Disconnect any drive that wont be part of your RAID (just so windows wont try to place the boot loader on that drive, i believe it installs it on the first drive it sees)

Make sure you go to support.dell.com and download the Intel Rapid Storage drivers, link here ( http://www.dell.com/support/home/us...5-r2&languageCode=EN&categoryId=SA&DCP=DNDTAG)

run the file and just chose "extract" and extract the files to a usb drive.

go to your bios and make sure your setup to use RAID, not AHCI. RAID will make sure the BIOS can see your nvme drive.

after configuring your raid, go ahead and boot from your windows 10 iso (via usb or an external cd),

when you get to the screen where you get to look for which partition to install, choose load drivers. plug in the usb you saved the raid drivers to, and load those drivers.

after the drivers load, you should see your RAID, and install there.

i recommend using UEFI, since Windows 10 can start up much faster as UEFI compared to legacy.

 

Ah, so I'm missing RAID drivers for the windows setup. Silly me, I thought the Windows 10 install would have them!

Thank you kindly for the pointers, just leaving to go home so I'll report back later.

 

Spot on, thanks. Windows is now installing on my new RAID volume.

I extracted the RAID drivers on to the Windows install USB, worked a treat.

 

Just an update to this, the latest drivers are here from intel: https://downloadcenter.intel.com/download/25165/Intel-Rapid-Storage-Technology-Intel-RST-RAID-Driver

For x64 WIndows install you want the x64 drivers obviously. Haha. But yes, they work mint.

 

There's so many good threads that get buried after a few weeks, wish we had a sticky thread that consolidated the different useful topics.

 

Yeah for sure. It took me a lot of digging to find this thread originally. I actually found it on Google haha

 

after much consideration, i rebuilt my laptop and reinstalled everything. changed the strip size on the raid to 128KB as well, and im getting slightly better performance



hope this helps in anyone's decision as far as creating a raid 0 volume

 

Hi guys. May i know how to install the SM951 physically on the alienware 15 ?
I found out it only has NGFF slot with B key. SM951 is M key. Please advice. Thanks

 

I'm surprised people are RAIDing the M.2 slots in the R2s. The second port is apparently not PCI-e 3 x4, so when you have two PCIe SSDs in there you are cutting your speed down - by raiding them you bring down the entire RAID. The sequential read per Samsung is 2,200 MB/sec, so the values in the screen short are not what I would be excited to see - especially in a RAID-0. On top of that it is not good to stripe drives difference performance - as I understand the hardware (fail Dell, fail) the first slot operates at full speed whereas the second one does not. They do not match each other therefore RAIDing them is just asking for trouble unless one is using SATA SSDs. Then you're good to go.

 

As far as the m.2 drives are concerned, they are the exact same model, capacity and such. raiding them in raid 0 will still work fine, except the speed will be reduced to the slower of the 2 interfaces. it would still be faster since samsung has the sm951 (256GB AHCI model) rated at read speeds of 2.5 GB/sec. reaching nearly 3 GB/sec is worlds faster than raiding 2 SATA III drives.

 

if your m.2 slot is a b key, then your m.2 slot is only meant to use SATA m.2, not the PCIe M.2.

 

Hi there, thanks for this information! Just to clarify - the BIOS will let you configure the RAID volume? Like stripe size and all, or is that another menu?

 

yes, when you create the raid volume in the BIOS, it will let you specify the stripe size and any other settings it would allow you to change. keep in mind, you cant change this after the volume is created.