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Can you create a RAID 0 on two of three identical NVME SSDs?

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Oct 22, 2018
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I have not figured out how to do this. I have three identical NVME drives on a single motherboard, and I would like Windows 10 on a solo drive and the other two on a RAID 0. Can this even be done? Going through the usual steps to create a RAID during Windows installation, the drive not included in the array does not show up as a drive where Windows can be installed.
 
You'll need either a hardware NVMe RAID controller or a UEFI-based softraid... the latter is much easier to attain. Both AMD and Intel tend to have ways to setup raid in bios if you are using the chipset NVMe slots.
 
Regardless of how you do it, you will likely hit PCIe bottlenecks that negate any benefit, whilst still granting all of the CPU/Latency/Integrity downsides of RAID0. At best, it's an impractical, expensive, complicated way to break even, and at worst, it's a lose-lose scenario that's slower, problematic, inconsistent, less secure, and slows down your CPU in the process.

Are you on PCIe 3.0 or 4.0? The only instances where it makes any sense whatsoever to RAID0 NVMe drives is on Epyc/Threadripper platforms where multiple PCIe SSDs can guarantee their own bandwidth rather than using shared lanes, or on a Rocket Lake PCIe 4.0 board if you bought PCIe 3.0 SSDs by mistake. In the Rocket Lake scenario, the better option (by far) is to return the PCIe 3.0 SSDs for a refund and just buy a PCIe 4.0 SSD instead; You cannot get any benefit on Rocket Lake beyond one PCIe 4.0 SSD.

RAID0 - AKA striping - really is a mechanical disk technology. Don't use it for SSDs unless you really have no alternatives.
 
What motherboard do you have? A lot of them don't allow NVMe RAID on all the M.2 slots. And why do you want RAID0 on 2 NVMe drives? If you are doing it for speed, then prepare to be disappointed.

Worse case you can install Windows 10 on the single drive like you wanted, then create a striped array in Windows using Storage Spaces.
 
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