Should I Use RAID 0 with M.2 Drives of Different PCIe Speeds?
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TechieTurtle87
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!
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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.
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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.
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FastLoader99: Exactly! Partitioning can be super useful. I wish I had done that instead of RAID.