M16 Raid 0 Performance not as expected

[Highlander]

Hello Everyone.
I hope everyone is doing well...

Recently acquired a best buy GU603HM. This has the I9-11900H and a 3060 graphics card.

This laptop is supposed to be PCIe Gen 4 and according to CPUZ it is.

I installed a pair of 980Pro 2 TB Drives. I was able to clone properly the factory system into this RAID array using paragon-software. Laptop boots fine and no real issues.

When running crystal mark 7.0 I am getting the following read/write speeds.

https://prnt.sc/1qvorgf

I find this to be half of what you would expect from these drives.

What are the possible situations?

Is it that one of the PCIe M.2 Slots is Gen 3 and the other is Gen 4?

For a laptop that supports raid from the bios, this would seem like a bad choice, but I have seen it in other laptops.

If this is the case, then you are losing performance as apparently you get a loss in performance in the random category when using raid 0 with M.2 SSDs.

Any advice would be welcome.

I like this machine but it could be a deal breaker and getting the AMD Advanced would be the way to go.

[RedSector73]

You are running - strip 0 and what byte size ?

Also why RAID ?
I get it will win every benchmark but I doubt you can feel or measure the difference NVMe without it vs one in RAID in the real world (unless it real RAID SAS with real controllers not onbaord ones)

[Highlander]

Honestly.. boot times and I have a couple of programs that I could use that extra difference. Plus I can see both drives as a single drive. Nice having 4TB single drive

[RedSector73]

My system boots in 12 seconds on Windows 10 default load and 15-18 seconds with my loadout. Just baseline for you.

I think not having identical drives in raid is going to limit to slowest drive.

Hope this is helpful.

[BigJohnny]

Nope, thats about all you get on a laptop. The raid controller is downstream of the DMI BUS. Could have told you that beforehand. literally everything on the laptop goes down 4 shared lanes.

[RedSector73]

BigJohnny wrote:
Nope, thats about all you get on a laptop. The raid controller is downstream of the DMI BUS. Could have told you that beforehand. literally everything on the laptop goes down 4 shared lanes.

yeah that was what trying to say... but didn't.

[Highlander]

They are identical. 2tb 980Pros both. 4tb total. I was wondering if one of the slots is PCIe 3 and the other is PCIe 4.

Any way to figure it out?

Thanks

[Highlander]

That is what it is!!!!!!!!!!! Secondary slot is PCIe 3.0

https://prnt.sc/1qx19x6

[Highlander]

I think its more that the main m.2 slot is going straight through the processor and the secondary slot is going via the pch.*

Otherwise both drives would perform the same independently just bottlenecked together and this is not the case.

I guess this was intended to have one optane drive and one regular data drive.

I need to do more testing to see if raid still offers benefit even while max throughput is maxed out as for one. Its one single logical drive and 2 i wonder if they use the cache combined and that could make it quicker for smaller tasks which is what i want to speed up.

*

[BigJohnny]

Two gen 3 M.2 Optane drives in raid zero VROC then a single gen 3 AIC P4800X optane drive, note the change in the 4K speeds. If I seperate the two in raid0 they look more like the second example.