m.2 RAID 0 on x99 Fatal1ty Gaming Professional i7

moresatish wrote: Is there any possibility of configuring two m.2 NVMe (Samsung 950 EVO) drives in RAID 0 boot on the  x99 Fatal1ty Gaming Professional i7 (or Taichi)? They did it on the Z170 7+ Also I have a i7 6800K (28 PCIe lanes) with a Quadro M4000 (16 lanes) and the two m.2 NVMe drives (4 lanes each). Do I have enough lanes? I am asking because the UEFI is only detecting one of the two m.2 drives.  Please help! :) I cannot wait to install the OS on this build, its been almost a week! Thanks, S

I have good news and bad news for you, although overall it is mostly bad, sorry to say. Also, an important question, and a clarification.

You mentioned two M.2 NVMe 950 EVOs. No such model exists. Do you mean 950 Pros? Or the very new, should be impossible to find, 960 EVO?

What version of Windows will you be using?

While a RAID 0 OS drive is supported on either board, if you have any Intel RAID driver (IRST) version 14.x or greater installed (available on your board's download page), there is a hardware problem.

When using a HEDT processor with 28 lanes, the M2_1 slot only supports SATA M.2 SSDs on BOTH boards. That's why your other M.2 SSD is not detected.

The "extra" PCIe 3.0 lanes that you have are allocated to the PCIe x16 slots. Both of these limitations are described in both board's specifications. You really must check the specs for details like this.

The Z170 chipset is very different from the X99 chipset. All of the M.2 slots on a Z170 board are connected to the Z170 chipset. The CPU's (16) PCIe 3.0 lanes are not used for the M.2 slot on Z170 boards. The Z170 chipset has the equivalent of PCIe 3.0 lanes (called DMI3) in it, while the X99 chipset has DMI2, which is equal to PCIe 2.0. The Z170 and most of the other Intel 100 series chipset are the first to have DMI3

You could buy an M.2 to PCIe slot adapter card for one of the NVMe SSDs, and put it in the PCIE5 slot. Both NVMe SSDs should be detected by the IRST software, but you won't see the SSD in the adapter card listed in the Storage Configuration screen. It will be shown in the System Browser feature in the Tools screen.

I've used two Samsung 950 Pros in RAID 0 as the OS drive. Do they boot faster than a single 950 Pro? No they don't. Any increase in booting performance is cancelled out by the slightly longer time it takes the RAID 0 array to begin working. Also, the random 4KB read speed is actually a bit slower in a RAID 0 array than a single NVMe SSD, which is normal for RAID 0.

I'm using a single 950 Pro as the OS drive on my Z170 EX7+ board now, instead of the RAID 0 array. Nothing wrong with the RAID 0 of 950 Pros, if you work with many large, 100MB+ files a lot, it is worth it.

Also, if you value a fast starting PC, then an X99 board will disappoint you. POST takes longer on X99 than other chipset boards, due to their complexity.