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Quick Discussion of native RAID 0 support in Windows 10
On the Microsoft Forums Someone wrote:I responded--even though the above was not written to me. This may or may not be of interest to anyone considering RAID 0 and Windows 10--so I thought I'd repost it here as there may be some folks unfamiliar with how to stripe drives in Windows 10 for RAID 0 performance without having to use either an integrated or dedicated RAID controller & without specific RAID drivers as well.
Again, not one single post in thousands I've helped with in forums about RAID that was positive - every single one was either a problem or a disaster.
And if you already knew the answer then why did you ask?
I qualified my opinion as exactly that yet you still reply without even the most basic human decency.
I was searching this evening for info an the AMD SB950 IDE/AHCI/RAID controller support--which atm does not support RAID mode on an EVO SSD. The problem is that I could not setup RAID normally, from inside UEFI, because then my boot drive--the Samsung EVO 850 won't run--even though it is not in the RAID config. So I had to set my UEFI contorller to AHCI (the only mode the EVO will run on through my AMD SB950), but I wanted to setup a couple of my other drives in RAID 0--without changing the UEFI bios setting from AHCI to RAID.
Over the years I've heard a lot of negative stuff about RAID that simply isn't true, so I responded below to the original poster as follows... Again, hope you find it at least slightly informative...if not, well, gosh, I...
Guy, I'm very late to this thread...but you should take a look at the Windows forums where tens of thousands of people write about the "problems" they have or had with Windows...... By your definition *no one* should be using Windows, either. Your comment above is ridiculous, frankly. When you've been in this business for a few years you'll realize that the *only* people who write threads in hardware/software sections are people with *problems* seeking answers. People who aren't having problems likely outnumber the people who are by at least 10-1, and *you never see them writing in RAID or Windows threads*--uh, because they aren't having any problems...! Your sentiment above is completely wrong.
More to the point, I've successfully used RAID 0 in a number of hardware scenarios and in a number of Windows versions without a *single* problem in ten years--I mean, not one! In fact, the only hard drive I've had go out on me when I was using it was running as IDE--not RAID, ironically. You see, neither the drives, the controllers, nor the OS version gives a bloody damn whether you run the drive in RAID or IDE--it's all the same to the drive and the OS.
People who are down on RAID are down on it because they know nothing about it except what they've read from other people having problems with it--people just like you. Had you used it and had you experience with it you'd know the truth of what I & Hawk say here.
More to the point--did you know that Windows 10 natively supports RAID 0? And no--I don't mean "with the proper drivers"--I mean with the standard Windows IDE/AHCI drivers. Pop open the computer management console, run the Disk Management program and let the fun begin. Take any two physical drives (maybe even 3--I haven't tried that yet), tell Windows you want a "striped drive partition" and Windows will give it to you and convert both drives to dynamic from basic automatically--and will stripe the drives and prepare partitions across both drives of whatever sizes you set out of what's available. Striping two physical drives and using them as a single partition is RAID 0, my friend. And Windows 10 supports it natively. The only limit to a dynamic partition is that you cannot boot from it--so you'd want to keep your boot drive as a basic drive in this scenario.
I actually found this thread because I also have an SB950 and have known for awhile that the AMD controller driver doesn't support RAID for the EVOs--and I searched this evening to see if anything has changed--and I guess not... Anyway, for people who are interested in how Windows 10 supports RAID 0 right out of the box, now you know how it can be done *without* the need for specialized RAID controller drivers. So long as a Hawk wasn't going to use his boot drive in the RAID 0 config and so long as he has two more EVOs to run in RAID 0 that are non-boot drives--this method would work fine in that case for the non-boot drives & RAID 0.
This is basically "software raid" but the truth is that it runs real close to what integrated hardware RAID 0 controllers do--*real* close in performance. You'd have to go to a dedicated PCIe RAID 0 controller to get better performance, in fact.
Last, what I've heard about RAID 0 for years is this and it's very silly: "If one drive goes out, you lose all your data." Guess what, though, a single IDE/AHCI drive has 0 fault tolerance. A pair of single IDE/AHCI drives running in RAID 0 also has 0 fault tolerance. So in either situation--with one drive running as IDE/AHCI, or with two drives running in RAID 0, if a drive goes, you lose your data! It makes no difference at all.
Now, if there were no benefits to RAID 0, why would Microsoft support it natively in Windows 10? I can tell you it's *much* faster than a single drive--much. So you need to think again on this subject.