I've got a bit of a conundrum here. My old x570 motherboard had two identical 1TB drives set up in RAID 0, both running on PCIe 4. Now that I've upgraded to a budget B550M board, one of the M.2 slots only supports PCIe 3. I know RAID should still function, but I'm wondering if this setup will throttle my PCIe 4 drive down to PCIe 3 speeds. Would I be better off just reformatting both drives to use the PCIe 4 slot for my OS, or will the RAID 0 setup just average the speeds of the two drives? I'm not too keen on reinstalling the OS and all my games if I can avoid it!
2 Answers
If you’re mainly gaming, RAID might not even be necessary. I used to think it made my games load faster, but honestly, the real perk for me was isolating the OS on its own partition. That way, if I mess up my OS, I can just format that partition without losing my games.
Yeah, if you put them in RAID, they're both going to run at the speed of the slowest drive. So in your case, the Gen 4 drive is going to be limited to Gen 3 speeds, plus the overhead can slow it down even more.
Exactly! Partitioning can be super useful. I wish I had done that instead of RAID.