Just purchased a ROG Zephyrus Duo 16, NVMe HDD upgrade questions.

[Ghost_Recon]

Hello all, I recently purchased a ROG Zephyrus Duo 16 GX650RX (4K / 3080ti) and I'm interested in swapping the
two 2 TB OEM Micron M.2 NVMe drives that came in a RAID 0 to two new Samsung Pro 980 NVMe drives.

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but it has been my understanding there really isn't much benefit in running NVMe drives in a RAID 0. The
articles and benchmarks I've seen seem to indicate that most laptops will be limited by the max
throughput of the chipset. So I'm thinking of just putting the OS on one drive and using the second as a
data drive for games. Has anyone here gone through the process of cloning a RAID 0 OS and copying it to a new
single drive? I'm planning on trying it with Macrium Reflect, but I have a few questions. For example, should the BIOS
remain set to RAID or would ACHI give better performance since the OS would then be on a single drive? Perhaps there wouldn't be
much of a difference since the NVMe protocol is what should be in use.

Of course I could just put in the new drives and do a fresh windows 11 install, but then I would lose the Asus recovery partition.
Also, while browsing this forum I saw a thread where someone had issues on a Duo 15 getting the 2nd screen to work as it did out of the box
after he did a fresh windows install.

The Duo 16 is great, I'm really impressed with it so far. One odd thing I noticed was after I setup the laptop for the first time and let it install updates, there was a firmware update that caused
the main screen to flicker unless I set the MUX to discrete mode. My first thought was the BIOS update might have toggled or reset a setting that's now
resulting in the screen flickering. But I haven't yet figured out which setting that could have been. Any ideas?

[Ghost_Recon]

I'm not sure what bios version came installed on the laptop, but the screen flickering I reported in my post above started after the bios updated to version 307. I just did the version 308 update and now I'm happy to report the is no longer screen flickering with the MUX in MSHybrid mode.

Edit: I posted too soon, after rebooting again it there is still a bit of screen flicker on the main display using MSHybrid mode. It's not too big of a deal for me at the moment since I'll mostly use this laptop connected to power with Discreet mode enabled. But I'll keep checking setings to see if I can figure out the cause.

[Ghost_Recon]

Today I was preparing to swap out the NVMe drives for the Samsung 980 Pro drives I purchased only to find that when I removed the primary NVMe drive and peeled off the heatsink, it's a 980 Pro!! So my laptop came with two 2 TB Samsung 980 Pro drives in a RAID 0. I never would've expected that but it's a pleasant surprise, but certainly helps justify the price of the laptp.

[Ghost_Recon]

Just incase anyone is curious, here are my CrystalDiskMark results for both the 980 Pro RAID 0 and single 980 Pro

RAID 0 980 Pro 2TB Drives


Cloned RAID 0 to Single 980 Pro 2 TB Drive


So IMO, RAID 0 isn't really doing much on the Zephryus Duo 16 except doubling the risk of losing all data if one drive went bad. That would be a risk I'd accept (I'd mitigate it with regular backups) if I was getting more speed, but since I'm not... I probably wont go back to RAID 0.

It's interesting that Dell, Asus, and Apple are starting to RAID 0 NVMe drives in laptops even though it seems to be a waste. I guess it could just be a marketing tactic.

[xeromist]

Thank you for sharing your findings!