Can i setup raid0 with three m2 on z690 dar kingpin?

jdec112016w

paulcao63
Can i setup raid0 with three m2 on z690 dar kingpin?

For starters read about RAID in the online manual, starts on page 57 for the KINGPIN, and per the manual be aware of this.
"Because RAID0 is only designed to distribute the data being written across multiple devices to improve performance there is **NO FAULT TOLERANCE**, meaning if one drive fails, the array fails. It may be possible to recover the data but that usually requires a data recovery service, which is not guaranteed and is usually very expensive". Last paragraph, page 62.

The lack of fault tolerance aside, I don’t know why anyone would want RAID 0 with SSDs, especially NVMe. To each their own I guess.

Straight answer: Yes you can setup RAID 0 with three M.2 NVMe drives.

All you need do is put the drives you want paired up on the VMD controller in the BIOS settings and have a windows 10 or 11 USB stick plugged in. Also plug in another USB stick with Intel RST drivers loaded onto it.
 
Once you have your RAID 0 array configured in the BIOS, boot into the Windows setup screen using the Windows OS USB stick. You'll notice once you get to the page where it asks you which drive you want to install Windows on, no drives are showing. This is where the USB stick with the Intel RST drivers comes in. Navigate through the sub-menus on the USB stick until you see the 'F6' driver and install that one. Now your RAID 0 drive should appear in the list of drives you can install Windows on. Proceed to install Windows as normal.
 
Be warned though, if even just 1 of those M.2 drives fails, the whole RAID 0 array will collapse and die and there is no way to get your data back. You'd also have to go back into the BIOS, delete the RAID 0 array and set all drives back to seperate drives to be able to use them again after a RAID 0 failure. 
 
It's safer to just buy 2 high capacity single M.2 NVMe drives and use 1 for your main OS and the other as a backup drive. M.2 NVMe drives are fast enough already without needing to put them in RAID 0.

Back in the day I used to pair up two SATA SSD's in RAID 0 so that the RAID 0 array would run at 1000mbs read/write. Because separately SATA SSD's only ran at about 550mbs read/write. Nowadays though, the average Gen4 M.2 NVME SSD will run at about 7000mbs read and 6000mbs write without being in RAID 0.

zippytek

ObscureEmpyre
The lack of fault tolerance aside, I don’t know why anyone would want RAID 0 with SSDs, especially NVMe. To each their own I guess.

can't think of anything, personally. waste of cash especially with gen5 about to launch. raid0 is for performance, nothing else

Wouldn’t really be any significant performance gains even with gen 4.

I use 2x Sabrent 4TB in Raid-0 as I install quite a alot of games and make great use out of my eVga 3090Ti FTW Ultra. Already I am down to 5.4GB of space already and I am not even done installing games. I use to have them separate with each 1 was used for games and operating system and 1 for backup drive. But I now just use a external 8TB drive for me back games and everything else.

Gadfly

ObscureEmpyre

zippytek

ObscureEmpyre
The lack of fault tolerance aside, I don’t know why anyone would want RAID 0 with SSDs, especially NVMe. To each their own I guess.

can't think of anything, personally. waste of cash especially with gen5 about to launch. raid0 is for performance, nothing else

Wouldn’t really be any significant performance gains even with gen 4.

Not sure that is true, especially if you are working with larger flat files. 

This kind of thinking reminds me of when people thought their 10th gen Intel CPUs would bottleneck a RTX 3080.