Hello all,
I have successfully installed RAID 0 on my Helios 500 PH517-51. Here is what I did, and why.
The stock drive that comes with this laptop, by todays standards, is very slow. Here is the performance reading before I reinstalled the OS.
I know that RAID 0 on these laptops have performance issues, however I can still take financial advantage of RAID. I purchased:
2 Kingston 1TB A2000 ($130 on Amazon right now, so a total of $260)
vs
Samsung 970 EVO Plus SSD 2TB ($400 on Amazon right now)
However I got the Kingston's on sale, so for me it was a much bigger delta.
I then installed the new drives and reinstalled windows. This gave me the following performance:
These are already much better numbers. I got the same speed on the second drive as well, so I proceeded to install the raid. I then raided the drive using the intel windows tools (I used the RTS drivers from ASUS, and don't forget to leave 10 meg of unpartitioned space at the end of the drive when you install windows). These are the results:
That's as much as a 65% improvement in performance, and **** close to the evo in speed.
On, and once done, you will need to move your windows health partition to the back of the drive, so you can increase the size of the C partition. I used the free version of AOMEI, and it worked great.
A point about RAID that I want to address, as I have seem many people talk about the dangers of RAID. When you do a RAID 0 with spinning hard drives, you run the risk of a HD failure. HD failures are pretty much inevitable. This is a dangerous world to live in
. However with Solid State, they will either fail within the first few weeks due to a manufacturing issue, or they will never fail if you operate them under expected conditions. The one thing that will kill an SSD, is heat. If this was a single drive, the drive would be doing twice the work, and be generating more heat then two drives. In my eyes, this means the risk of two cooler drives failing, so lower then 1 hot drive failing.
In reality, outside of a server application, any NVMe drive failing due to use is extremely rare. Don't be afraid to RAID 0 your SSD's, and to be honest, I think it actually reduces the risk of data loss, not the other way around.
