Hey Everyone,
Thanks for all the info on the different ways to set up the Dark MB, the only problem is I'm too confused which is the correct way I need to set up my board.
I would like to build a high-speed machine as I do a few computer graphic models (rendering) and use CAD quite a bit. My files are quite large and use many textures

My render engine does not use SLI so no need for it.
 
Have very little knowledge about how to set up the raid.
 
In the EVGA user guide on page 62, they mention,
"BEFORE BUILDING AN ARRAY, BE SURE YOUR SSDs 
OR HDDs ARE THE SAME MAKE, MODEL, AND CAPACITY. MIXING DRIVES CAN CAUSE ANYTHING FROM ODD PERFORMANCE ISSUES, ARRAYS DE-SYNCING, LARGE SCALE DATA CORRUPTION,
AND/OR UNRECOVERABLE ARRAY FAILURE.
MAKE SURE THAT YOUR INTENDED HDD SUPPORTS RAID; IF NOT, THE DRIVE MAY CAUSE CONSTANT DESYNCHRONIZATION ISSUES DUE TO DATA TTL
TIMERS NOT SENDING AN “ALL IS WELL” SIGNAL WITHIN THE EXPECTED TIMEFRAME, WHICH WILL SEND THE CONTROLLER THE MESSAGE THAT THE DRIVE HAS FAILED OR DISCONNECTED.".
 
Air cooled rig.
Maybe a CPU closed Loop Cooler as I'm thinking will get very hot.
 
I would like to use the following:
 
Intel Core i9-7940XPhanteks Enthoo Primo
32mgb memory
Intel^® Optane™ Memory Ready
M.2 NVMe PCI-E SSD
Nocula Fans
3x SSD's  
2x 2080ti cards
 
Any help would be greatly appreciated. 

Do you need just performance or also redundancy in case a drive fails?

 
Thanks for all the replies,
I was thinking a raid 10,
2x Samsung 970 EVO M.2 NVMe SSD 500GB each to run my OS and programs.
3x Samsung 860 PRO 2.5in SATA SSD 2TB or 6 x Samsung 860 PRO 2.5in SATA SSD 1TB
Because im using nvme do i need to intall the Optane?
 
George

I have been fooling around with RAID on SSDs for a couple of years now. I am not convinced that the hardware keeps up with these. Remember that raid was developed for cylindrical, magnetic drives--which operate at very low speeds vs their interfaces. The SSDs operator faster than SATA by a wide margin and faster than PCIe in many cases. That said, you have some other limits.
 
RAID of NMVe is only allowed with an Intel VROK key. From Page 22 of the EVGA X299 Dark manual:
---START QUOTE---
24. VROC Header
VROC stands for Virtual RAID On CPU. The VROC header works in conjunction with PCIe SSDs. The header is used to provide an Intel® hardware key that will unlock advanced RAID functions, such as RAID5. SATA RAID does not require a VROC key.
At the time of print, VROC will work with many SSDs, but is only bootable with Intel® SSDs. VROC is only compatible with Core™ X-series Skylake-X CPUs.
---END QUOTE---
My understanding of that is you a) have to buy Intel SSDs, and, b) you have to buy a "key" device from Intel. Scanning some prices, I see prices anywhere from $125 to $400 just for the key dongle.
 
Your Samsung 860 PRO 2.5in SATA can be placed in a RAID array. RAID10 requires a minimum of four drives, so more than your example of 3. RAID10 sets must be in multiples of 2 drives. You will lose half of your storage to RAID10 redundancy. RAID1 requires an even number of drives, so not for 3 drives. Again, you lose half of your space to redundancy. RAID5 will be your most space efficient option. Here you lost the equivalent of the space of one drive in each raid set. Three drives is the practical minimum. With a 3-drive set, you lose 1/3rd of your space. With a 6-drive set you lose 1/6th of your space. You can have an odd number of drives with RAID5. I have been doing RAID5 with large data centers since the early 1980s. RAID5 is the RAID of choice for the computer-room sized raid sets.
 
As I said in the first paragraph, I have not had good speed results with my RAID configurations. RAID5 is supposed to be faster, because the drives work as a unit. Picture reading a large file/object. The first block comes from drive 1, the second block from drive 2, and so on. So, there is no drive latency. Drive latency is a big deal with mechanical, magnetic HDDs. Not so with SSDs. They have, effectively, no latency. That is, you don't have to wait for the disk to turn to get to the sector you want. The sector you want is always ready with SSD. The question I have is, do all the computations and the bottleneck of a RAID controller slow down SSD drives? Remember, everything must go through the controller. The controller is what figures out what drive a particular sector is located upon. I have found that you can speed up SSD drives a lot more by increasing sector size than by using RAID. When I set up an SSD to handle large objects that are processed entirely, I use a sector size of 64K (65,536 bytes) instead of the default of 4,096 bytes. This wastes a little room with small objects, because the minimum disk allocation for any object is now 65,536 bytes; however, it means 16 times as much data is read/written with a single operation.
 
I will wager you that you can increase performance more by increasing the sector size than by using RAID.
 
RAID does create some fault tolerance. If you lose 1 drive in a RAID set, you can get it back by replacing the drive and allowing the RAID controller rebuild. If you lose 2 drives in any RAID set, you lose everything. That is the limitation of RAID protection.
 
Also, you must have the exact correct matching RAID drivers on your recovery media to recover to boot into a RAID system. That is, you can't just boot up a recovery disk to fix a Windows problem. You must create a custom Windows recovery disk for your system with the correct RAID drivers loaded, or manually load RAID drivers during a recovery boot. (Picture locating your RAID drivers during a recovery boot.) I got very sick of this. I got very sick of everything to do with the RAID drive causing extra steps and you-can't-get-there-from-here problems.
 
I use an external drive on a USB 3 cable to back up my system with Symantec System recovery. There are cheaper solutions. I also use Samsung Magician to bit-image copy my boot drive onto a spare. Samsung Magician is free. That is, my D: drive is an exact copy of my C: drive and I can change over to it by changing the BIOS boot order. This way I don't have to start loading Windows if I lose my C: drive.
 
Lou

Problem with the VROC is that it is all heavy handed / controlled by Intel - they don't really want consumer grade hardware doing it they want the server grade expensive enterprise hardware that is going to cost $$$ to have all the features.
 
That said I agree, raid 5 will be your best bet. I have done setups with both 5 and 10. I used 5 in my personal PLEX server but used 10 in a company data server - think of 10 as a mirrored stripe, you get increased capacity and data backup with an increase of speed. Both of those were hardware level raid

Just use the VVME as your OS drive, forget about bothering with raid for the OS drive as it is plenty fast on its own. If you are concerned about space for the C drive just get an Samsung 1tb drive, by the time you have bought 2 500gb and the vroc and the time spent trying to get raid to work (with the intel drives) you would have been better off just getting the Samsung NVME 1tb and been done
Use regular (5 or 10) raid for your SATA drives for your bulk storage