Highpoint Technologies SSD7103

[francoistoen]

Hi everybody

Is there anybody having tested the Highpoint SSD7103 on a rampage 6 extreme encore.
Thanks for your experiences
François

[G75rog]

I purchased their 7101 planning to use it for holding multiple OS drives. It locked up and corrupted my main drive. I sent it back to them with instructions that if it tested OK then save me the trouble and toss it in a dumpster for me. It was not going back in my system. They sent me a replacement and I gave it to someone I didn't like. That model was removed from production and replaced with the 7101A. Maybe they got better.
I use the ASUS Hyper X16 V2 instead.

[francoistoen]

Hi
Thanks for sharing your (bad) experience. Is the ASUS Hyper X16 V2 a bootable nvme raid?
François

[Int8bldr]

francoistoen wrote:
Hi
Thanks for sharing your (bad) experience. Is the ASUS Hyper X16 V2 a bootable nvme raid?
François

I have ASUS Hyper X16 V2 with 4x Intel Optane SSD 905P in RAID 0 in a VROC set up.
So yes you can use the ASUS Hyper X16 V2 in a bootable raid BUT ONLT if you use Intel m.2 drives. Samsung will not work! Only intel will work.
Further if you want a RAID 5 or something else than RAID 0 you need a VROC key for that. RAID 0 does not need a VROC key.

[G75rog]

I use the V2 to hold 4 drives with individual OS's on them. The other 4 drives on my Apex contain data and gaming with 13TB between the 8 drives.
Only my NAS boxes use Raid.

[Biozzz]

Hello,

Forget about the old PCI Express v3 raid cards !

This card is the latest PCIe v4 standard (twice the speed of PCIe v3), and is backwards compatible with
SLOWER PCIe v3 (half speed)

HighPoint SSD7505 BOOTABLE PCIe Gen4 x16 4-Port M.2 NVMe RAID Controller

https://highpoint-tech.com/USA_new/series-ssd7505-overview.htm

It seems to work fine with my ASUS Intel Core-X ROG Rampage VI EXTREME ENCORE X299 EATX Motherboard
with my two Samsung 970 PRO 1TB M.2 SSDs which are bootable

Regards,

Biozzz

[francoistoen]

Hi
Thanks Biozzz for that info. I didn't look for PCIE Gen4 thinking it was too expensive but in fact it is roughly the same price as PCIE Gen3. I will dig your info more.
Regards
François

[C2001Carl]

I'm using SSD7103 RAID 0 with 4-Samsung 1TB 980 PRO, 1st 1TB partition bootable, Windows 10 Pro installed. I have R6EE, BIOS 0901. (When card installed had 0702 BIOS) Just updated BIOS to 0901, once flashed have to reenable XMP, disable fast boot and reenable Launch CSM, all other BIOS settings for SSD7103 stays with 0901 BIOS, The drive is fast 9154.60 MB/s Read and 17396.42 MB/s Write see attached. My Corsair 128GB DDR4-3800 Ram with XPM enabled and Extreme OC.

Originally I used 2 1TB 970 Pro in SSD7103, just as I was testing SSD7103, Samsung released 1TB 980 PRO for cheaper price, instead of buying 2 more 1TB 970 PRO decided to purchase 4 1TB 980 PRO's for $220 more got 4 1TB 980 PRO instead of 2 1TB 970 PRO. 980 PRO will only run at PCIe 3 speed but with RAID 0 everything is much faster. Windows took 8 minutes to install and boot to Windows without XMP or OC. Configuring BIOS for SSD7103 and flashing SSD7103 BIOS took longer than Windows installation. I'm very happy with SSD7103 with 4-980 PRO everything faster even file copy is fast.

[francoistoen]

Hi C2001CARL
Thank you for your experience with SSD7103. Do you know wether the bootable array (RAID 0) can be used to clone or restore a backup of my actual OS and softwares?
Best regards

[C2001Carl]

Yes you can. Go to Control Panel, Backup and Restore (Windows 7), create a System Image on a USB Hard Drive. 1) Remove all of your hard drives including NVMe drives and USB drives, 2) make sure you set in BIOS to boot into UEFI mode, 3) disable Secure boot in BIOS, 4) disable Fast Boot, 5) Enable Launch CSM, 6) under key management save the secure boot keys, 7) under PK Management delete key (delete only PK Management Key), 😎 prepare a flash drive for SSD7103 UEFI ROM package, 9) connect your SSD7103 with 2 to 4 NVMe drives to a PCIe x16 slot (it needs to be in a x16 slot if using 4 NVMe drives, 10) boot to the flash drive you created and flash the SSD7103 BIOS (FS0:\> SSD7103.nsh) if successful you will have a message "Passed". 11) Next create a bootable flash drive extract SSD7103_UEFI_v1.1.4_19_04_29 unzipped to the root of bootable flash drive, 12) your motherboard's BIOS post screen should display information about the NVMe SSD's, 13) boot to flash drive, 14) next enter the following command to enter the RAID creation utility: ArrayCreate.efi, 15) Next, create the array using the following command: create RAID0. This will create a RAID0 array using all of the SSD's, and configured for maximum capacity: 16) You can now exit the utility. Enter the following command: Exit. 17) Insert Windows install DVD or Flash Drive, 18) Install Windows, to Where do you want to install Windows, click load drivers browse to flash drive select Highpoint NVMe Controller, after loading driver return to the Where do you want to install Windows interface. The previous Legacy disks will now be recognized as a RAID array: create your partition size and install Windows, 19) once Windows installed connect your System Image Drive, then go into Backup and Restore (Windows 7) in Control Panel and restore from system image, 20) then install Highpoint RAID Management software.

You could also use a partition software (I use AOMEI Partition Assistant) clone your Windows drive before above steps 1 to 16, instead step 17) of booting to Windows Installation boot to your partition software, load driver, partition and format drive and clone new formatted drive, I did 2 different PC's one on my Asus R6EE with Windows install and the other one on my MSI with partition software, I think the first way Windows Install was better.

I would use clone disk only for testing and overclocking to see how everything runs. I strongly recommend steps 1 to 18 for a fresh install of Windows as not to carry over problems. Fresh install of Windows and reinstall all of your software would be your best option. By the way once you use your cloned Windows disk and want to do a fresh install you don't have to any of the above steps, only when you up date your BIOS you have to do steps 3, 4 and 5, plus reenable XMP and what ever overclock settings you changed. Good Luck