Does GX-792-77PF support PCIe NVMe RAID0 as secondary and SATA SSD as primary OS disk

md_maarschalk

Requirements for the setup: 2x 1TB NVMe PCIe X4 in RAID0 to deliver a 2TB superfast data disk, 1x 512GB 2,5" SATA SSD as Windows OS disk, 64GB DDR4 RAM

According to another post, the GX-792-70JL has these drive bays:

CON5102: SSD M.2 2280 SATA 3.0 and PCIe X4 NVMe (the original ones are Samsung SM951)
CON5103: SSD M.2 2280 SATA 3.0 (metal bracket and screws needed/SSDs superimposed)
CON5104: SSD M.2 2280 SATA 3.0 (located on left of the HDD)
One HDD SATA 3.0

Q1: Does the superseding GX-792-77PF contain the same drive bays and will that support two (2) NVMe PCIe X4 1TB disks in a RAID0 setup to get a 2TB lightning-fast data disk?

Q2: Does that drive bay construction and the BIOS allow me to set the SATA 3.0 2,5" bay with 512GB SSD as primary boot device?

Robitzik

Every GX-792 has the same board, the last letters mainly help identify model configuration variations, like FHD or 4K display, storage configs and amounts, same story with RAM.
You have only one NVMe capable M.2 slot, so you cannot RAID 0 NVMe protocol, you would be better off buying a single large NVMe SSD instead of feeding power to multiple slots, especially if you do not get work done that can use such speeds as for example 2 x 960 PRO, you must be a hardcore video editor if this is the case. And for your second question, you can use any of those slots as a boot drive, the bios automatically locates the drive with Windows boot manager on it and boots your OS, there is no more legacy type boot policy, like "Master" and "Slave" drives. Hope this info helps

Robitzik

Every GX-792 has the same board, the last letters mainly help identify model configuration variations, like FHD or 4K display, storage configs and amounts, same story with RAM.
You have only one NVMe capable M.2 slot, so you cannot RAID 0 NVMe protocol, you would be better off buying a single large NVMe SSD instead of feeding power to multiple slots, especially if you do not get work done that can use such speeds as for example 2 x 960 PRO, you must be a hardcore video editor if this is the case. And for your second question, you can use any of those slots as a boot drive, the bios automatically locates the drive with Windows boot manager on it and boots your OS, there is no more legacy type boot policy, like "Master" and "Slave" drives. Hope this info helps

md_maarschalk

Thank you for the reply and effort you put in the asnwer.

I read some articles on real world performance gains with two (2) NVMe disks in RAID0, and the results were not spectacular actually. It seems the current top performance models already come considerably close to the cap of NVMe. So the advise to use a single large disk seems a valid option since there is only one slot available anyway.

As for the purpose... The laptop will serve as a Hyper-V server with a small virtual datacentre for development and testing. dc, 2x sql, 4x web, file, conversion, clients etc. and multiple instances running at the same time. My current Alienware17R1 is handling this considerably well, but the 32GB RAM limit, the absence of NVMe and the exhausted battery are the reason behind the search for a replacement.

I put the 960 PRO on the shopping list.

Robitzik

Besides the NVMe SSD, if you want to push it even further, you can still use the other two M.2 SATA slots and configure them in RAID 0, 850 EVO M.2 2280 1TB two of these should suffice and you should theoretically have about 1.1GB read and 1GB write speeds, almost NVMe speeds if you ask me, and use the good ol' 2.5" bay as your bootdrive, if you do work like that, a simple 850 EVO or PRO would suffice for Windows, as you don't get job done on that disk, you need the speed on the other configs. Maybe you noticed i keep recommending Samsung SSD's, well, they're simply the best out there and they don't dissapoint. Good luck with your setup