Acer Predator 500 (PH517-51)

brwster455

Hi all. I just bought this laptop last month and installed an Intel Optane 32GB memory module in the open NVMe slot. It seams there are two Intel Rapid Storage Technology Drivers to choose from for intel Optane. One has advanced features such as management of RAID 0/1/5/10 volumes and the other is just basic RST drivers. Which one should I use? I have the stock 250gb NVme SSD and 1 TB hard drive. The one with advance features seams to use a lot more CPU resources.

sri369

WARNING: Using RAID will turn one of the disks unavailable to the user, and would be used as a backup to the accessible disk.

xapim

As @sri369 said and very well raid only works well if both drives are the same type/size (even so it's always a risk if one of the drives fail you will loose everything as the other becomes also unusable this for raid 0 the most common used) otherwise it will use the second as backup/recovery and it will be invisible from windows probably your 1tb hdd will be gone as this happened to many and to break the raid is also a nightmare so unless you know perfectly well and what you a re doing never use raid especially on laptops

ven98

Can you post your device's specs(e.g CPU, RAM, storage)?

brwster455

Thanks, Here's My Specs
Acer Predator Helios 500 (PH517-51)
Processor i7-8750H
Memory 16GB DDR4
SSD Kingston HFS256GD9MNE  250GB NVMe
HDD 1TB Harddrive
GPU Nvidia GTX 1070
Killer Wirless AC 1550i Network Adapter E2500 GB Ethernet Controller
Chipset Intel HM370 with Thunderbolt 3

If this laptop doesn't come with a Raid setup, I'll just use the basic Intel RST Rapid Stg Technology drivers as the CPU usage seems to be a lot less with them using intel Optane memory.

sri369

brwster455 said:

If this laptop doesn't come with a Raid setup, I'll just use the basic Intel RST Rapid Stg Technology drivers as the CPU usage seems to be a lot less with them using intel Optane memory.

Out of curiosity: why do you want to use RAID on laptop? And also why would you want to use intel optane when your primary is a SSD already?

brwster455

Thanks for the comment. I not wanting to use a raid setup. I thought that this laptop came stock using Raid and so i would have to use intel RST drivers with raid. Intel Optane memory should make the 1TB hdd as fast as an SSD since intel Optane now works to accelerate secondary storage.

sri369

brwster455 said:

Thanks for the comment. I not wanting to use a raid setup. I thought that this laptop came stock using Raid and so i would have to use intel RST drivers with raid. Intel Optane memory should make the 1TB hdd as fast as an SSD since intel Optane now works to accelerate secondary storage.

I think you are mistaken here - intel optane does NOT make HDD on par with SSD. It merely loads frequently used programs into the "cache" for faster subsequent accesses. So if you use HDD for large games and such, it wouldn't really make much difference for you. Think of intel optane to be working on lines how windows pre-fetch service loads frequently used programs to RAM. If you keep playing the same game day after day after day it might help, but if you were to play a different game every day it won't be of much help.

Also, if you do not want to use RAID, do not even bother trying to set it up. Many on here had that setback losing 100% of data on the secondary disk. It simply is not worth the risk!

brwster455

Ok thanks. It was supported on this laptop, so I gave it a try. It does help on the two games i play with load times a little. 

xapim

@brwster455 for better performance on your 2 games move them to the nvme if you can if you are thinking on upgrading the normal hdd i suggest upgrade to an wdblack 1tb 7200rpm do not go for sshd as the sshd will not cach anything unless they are uses as main system hdd for data only they perform even worse than a normal hdd i have 2 as system and if you benchmark them for data only they are even slower than my wd blue i can post the results if needed as ppl tend to say sshd is 5times faster they are completely wrong its just bad advertisement from the manufacturers to sell more.

PS: if you wish to break the raid you can but bare in mind do backup/clone everything first before changing rst to ahci and i am just curious you have intel optane memory installed (32gb?) in the second nvme slot paired in raid with the nvme yes ? becaus all motherboards have intel optane option but might not bring it installed usually its a user upgrade same as the second nvme slot is olny brings the 256gb nvme installed anyway just wondering if you have it or not just in case you might not know the optane memory its installed in the nvme pcie 4 lanes slot not in the normal ram usually its only used when you laptop doesn't support nvme the user buy's an optane drive to replace the normal m.2 sata to pair with the normal hdd this is what usually happens as if you have nvme ie the need to use optane memory nvme tends to be faster as this solution was invented by intel and intended to those who only have one ssd pcie slot so forfeiting the normal ssd for the optane and to me it's not worth it i would not replace my wd blue 3d nand 2tb for only 32gb optane which u can't use as storage either as its to cache only

ven98

The SSHD utilises the cache when installed as a second drive

I would personally get SSHD over HDD for games, because of the faster 

subsequent access. 

When it comes to optane you don't have to play the same game every day in order for it get better at loading it. You run the game once and the optane will write the most frequent files that are loaded in the game to the cache. It isn't bad, but I would spend more for a 256GB or 512GB SSD over that. As you already have an SSD on the M.2 port, it isn't worth replacing the SSD with that.

Optane can be used as storage. If you don't unable iRST with optane from BIOS, the optane will be read as a regular 32GB SSD, not that 32GB are useful for anything these days. 

As @xapim mentioned if some games are not running well on the HDD, move them to the SSD.

The only thing I would consider an upgrade is if you add another NVMe or SATA SSD(the 2nd port supports NVMe, but I don't know how many pci-e lanes. There is no point creating a RAID 0 between the SSDs, as they are already very fast as they are.