Spent the last 24 hours trying to get motherboard raid going on an MSI Godlike X670E board and nothing I can do will make it work. This is using the Xpander-Z M.2 expansion card with two 980 Pro 1TB drives installed in the PCI-E slot below the GPU. Both drives are recognized in bios and I can go as far as in the Raidxpert bios utility to first initilize the drives and then add them to a raid 0 array which shows up in the bios raid utility. However going into windows each disk shows up individually. Not sure why.
Can also create a storage pool of them with a little effort due to some cluster f size issue however the performance is horrible.
Thank you for the links. Already had read the pdf instructions earlier today and even though I followed them exactly Windows not see a single drive but two. Wasn’t sure about the other link but I think this could be a major bios bug. Shame MSI not attach recommended raid drivers on their support page fwiw.
Think I know whats going on. I neglected to mention I am using a pci-e 4.0 NZXT riser cable as I wanted better air flow for the gpu. So I wonder if because the motherboard is actually a pci-e 5.0 board and the Xpander card is probably also a pci-e 5.0 card if using the 4.0 cable is causing this issue.
Will have to check the link speed in HWinfo and run independant benchmark to see if the speed is being shorted then just try directly attaching the card to the motherboard. If its not that I’ll just create a storage space pool instead.
Dont think so… even if the link is down to 4.0, the disks are present in bios so comunication established, if i understood correctly, you cant see the constructed raid array volume in windows, instead you see 2 drives.
Seems the issue is correctly creating the raid array. Anyway im no RAID expert on modern RAID chipsets…
EDIT: Just notice now after you post the Windows bench… indeed the 980 Pro are a PCIe 4.0… so you wouldn’t get any PCIe 5.0 connection between the motherboard, your link is in fact down to 4.0 and not due the NZXT riser.
I finished yesterday a new build for a client Gigabyte X670 Aorus Elite AX with a Crucial T700 1Tb PCIe 5.0 linked to the a Ryzen 7800X3D… 12700Mb/s - 9500Mb/s
I really dont see any advantages in modern NVMe RAID…
Well I settled for a software striped volume created in Disk Management. At least that works.
Included benchmarks if anyone is interested. Interesting to note that creating a Microsoft storage pool provided worst scores than a single disk and so didn’t bother to post any storage pool benchmarks.
In this case you have to force the driver installation by using the “Let me pick…” option and pressing the “Have Disk” button.
Don’t forget to create a system restore point before starting the procedure (to be able to get the previously running driver back at any time).
Regarding the creation of an NVMe RAID0 Array I totally agree with this statement.
After having done several tests with my X570 chipset AMD system running 2x1TB Samsung 980 Pro SSDs as RAID0 array (see attached picture) I have given up the idea to boost the speed by the creation of a RAID0 array.
By the way - the user will not even realize a noticeable performance gain in comparison with a single NVMe SSD while executing “normal” PC tasks (except Video Encoding or something similar).
The risks of a complete data loss cannot be compensated by the higher benchmark numbers you may get while reading or writing extremely big sized files.
Have incredible news. Was finally able to get it working!
Unbelievable!
The issue is that the auto installer does not work. You need to download the latest AMD Raid driver from the AMD website for your particular chipset. Mine was raid_windows_driver_932_00158.zip and decompress it and look for the Nvme_DID folder and the Win10 drivers and install each one manually in this order: RcBottom, RcRaid, RcCfg. After that reboot.
Seems like I got a lower score than software raid stripe I made in disk management.
Wonder if its because the I dropped the cluster size from 256 to 128 in the Raidxpert bios utility.
At least the sequential read and writes are up but the 4K-64 scores are worst bringing it down.
Side note and editorial: It is a sincere shame that the AMD driver writing team can not figure out how to install drivers. Makes you wonder if they can’t do the simplest action I have taken for granted with Intel Raid drivers what else have they messed up and broken. For such an expensive chipset that X670E was or is I expected more.
No…i think you’re not alone here, i think everybody expects more from it.
On the consumer side i mean.
But just look at Fernando’s numbers… what else can we say, its like a Gen5
I would start looking for a Gen5 NVMe for taking advantage of that X670E PCIe5.0
Anyway, glad you solved the issue… cheers.
Funny I’m using same config as Fernando with two 1 TB 980 Pros. Wonder if I should max out sector size and redo the array. I can only imagine what scores two pcie 5.0 drives would yield but went with the 980s because they were onsale cheap. Would also need a better riser cable to go pcie 5.
I set mine at 256Kb thinking bigger is better. Scores went up a little. Wonder though why software stripe in Windows yields so much fast Random 4K-64 scores than motherboard raid. Maybe its caching.
