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New Rig


PoleCat
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i7 6700K

Asus Z170-A

GTX 980 (No Change)

16GB (2 x 8GB) GSkill DDR4 3200

Samsung SM951 512 GB Internal SSD - PCI Express 3.0 x4 (This will be replacing my 2x250GB RAID0 array and will act as my boot and fast apps/games partition).

High hopes for this system build. Should be commencing as soon as I receive all the parts.

I will post pics of the build as I progress.

Out

 

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That PC will be a number crunching beast.
Here I'm still with an 2008 i7 920, overclocked to 3.6 GHz only when flying. The SSDs will make a difference for sure. On my machine, the storage and RAM are the only improvements. I started to study the use and processing of SAR imagery for land cover cartography (huge amounts of data) so I had to buy more drives, two 2TB SSHDs, one more SSD and add more 12GB of also GSkill DDR3-1600.

Let's see what brings DCS 2.0 :)

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Update:

I acquired a second Samsung SM951 512GB I am going to run 2 of these in NVMe RAID0 under Windows 10 as my OS and fast apps partition. I will use 2 Samsung 850 EVO 250GB in RAID0 for my slower static data partition. Yes that's right 2x250GB Samsung 850 EVO SSD's in RAID0 will be my SLOW partition. I will backup both daily using acronis and an external 2TB WD Black.

I am excited to find out how these very fast SSDs (PCI-E 3.0X4) are going to perform in RAID0. I read some where a single one of these is "crack head" fast. In RAID0 it will not double in performance but it will increase well beyond its already stellar single drive performance ratings. Maybe 1.5X crack head fast?

In any case this is going to be one hell of a build.

I will probably record a full build video and review for this one.

Out

Edited by PoleCat
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  • 2 weeks later...

A little update.

I believe that I may be the first person to get NVMe raid0 working in a bootable configuration. I spent hours on the phone with Asus support who failed to help me get this configuration bootable. At the end of this fruitless endeavor I was told that my SM-951 500GB NVMe PCI-E SSD's were incompatible and that Asus could help me no further. Searching the web I found a few instances of people getting RAID0 working on many boards but not in a bootable configuration. (They could only boot to a single NVMe drive).

Not being one to give up I spent the next 4 hours plus experimenting and in the end finally got it working.:) I think most of the issues people are having are due to a fundamental lack of understanding of UEFI, what it is, how it works, and how it interacts with operating systems. I will layout the process shortly on how I got this all working here and on a few tech forums that I frequent where many are in search of answers on getting bootable NVME PCI-E Raid0 working with the new Z170 boards.

Happy days!

Out

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Ok here are the UEFI settings needed for the ASUS Z170-A and NVMe RAID0 for boot. I am using the latest release from Asus Which is UEFI/BIOS Version 1101.

151023100523.BMP
151023100549.BMP
151023100629.BMP
151023100652.BMP
151023100722.BMP
151023100752.BMP

Once these settings were configured I used the WINDOWS 7 USB/DVD DOWNLOAD TOOL ([URL="https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/windows-usb-dvd-download-tool"]https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/windows-usb-dvd-download-tool[/URL]) to create a Windows 10 x64 bootable USB flash drive from my Windows 10 x64 ISO file. (Any UEFI boot disk should work).

At this point I rebooted the machine and entered the UEFI/BIOS. In the boot section I selected the UEFI version of my flash drive as the boot override option.

On reboot Windows begins the installation; however, the newly created RAID0 volume is not detected. Here you must feed the installation (add) the Intel Rapid Storage Drivers (Browse to the inf file in the X64 folder (iaStorAC.inf)). You can download these at the link below.....

[URL="http://station-drivers.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1613:intel-rapid-storage-technology-rst-version-14-6-1-1030-whql&catid=16:articles&Itemid=171&lang=fr"]http://station-drivers.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1613:intel-rapid-storage-technology-rst-version-14-6-1-1030-whql&catid=16:articles&Itemid=171&lang=fr[/URL]

After the RST driver is loaded the RAID0 volume was detected and installation proceeded as normal from there.

~Paul

Note: I have since set UEFI/BIOS memory frequency to XMP mode and it is now running at 3200MHz not 2133MHz as the first screenshot indicates.

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