dual ( 7 / 10 ) boot question

CountMike said:

There are other "free" things but you have to wash your hands after !!

on my current raid i did run into a problem as follows - my power supply started failing and system started giving errors and crashing - i had no idea it was power supply until it eventually exploded but before it did the computer tricked me into resetting bios into default because i thought bios was the problem - this disabled the RAID and the system would not boot ... however when i went into bios and re-enabled RAID and replaced the PSU it was as good as new ... so in my very limited experience RAID isn't really that scary ...

also while i had rotational drives fail and usb drives fail i never had an SSD fail yet so again, based on my limited experience i am not super worried about SSD failing and taking down the raid with it ...

but most importantly the motherboard has three m.2 slots which means spreading the load across 3 flash controllers ( which can get hot enough to throttle even with a copper heatsink ) thus increasing total IOPS and i can't resist the urge to take advantage of this ...

only other option would be to get HHHL ( half height half length ) enterprise SSD with like 1 TB capacity which would match the performance of three M.2 drives in raid ... but not only would this be expensive it would take the last PCI-e lanes on the mobo and i would have nowhere to put my firewire adapter for my firewire soundcard ...

i mean i guess i could figure something out if i really wanted to but M.2 raid would be a super clean solution for me ...

EDIT: besides, even if the RAID array fails my data is on a separate rotational drive anyway so it won't be affected ...

AddRAM said:

What`s free ?

extra performance from RAID is free.

would cost the same to run 2 X 250 gb versus 1 X 500 gb because raid is a function of the X299 chipset that Skylake-X CPUs use and motherboard has slots for 3 X M.2 SSDs.

in a test such raid is faster than a single drive:

Triple M.2 Samsung 950 Pro Z170 PCIe NVMe RAID Tested - Why So Snappy? | PC Perspective

this test was on an older Intel chipset but it's hard to imagine that a brand new one would work worse.

they said going from single to dual drive is where most performance gain is, but there is still a small gain in performance going from dual to triple. i'd be fine with either dual or triple but it has to be the right size - dual would be 500 GB and triple 750 GB so i need to know how much space i need.

they said the only downside is when you use extra M.2 slots you lose some SATA ports and i verified with the manual for AsRock X299 Taichi motherboard this is the case - i will lose a lot of SATA ports - but i only need one anyway - i don't need all 10 SATA ports or whatever number it has - makes no difference to me.

i'm not concerned with boot time - just want the system to feel snappy once it's loaded.

maybe i should go with dual 500 GB drives this way if the RAID fails i can use them separately, whereas 250 GB drives would be useless separately - too small unless combined in an array. i have a lot of old SSD drives that are all useless because the capacity is too small - this is probably biggest downside to going with multiple 250 GB drives is that they can ONLY be useful in a raid whereas a 500 GB drive i could for example move to my old laptop some day to replace the 250 GB M.2 drive there ... then again, you can't really invest into computer hardware unless it's a case or power supply ...