Z240 Raid Question - 2xHP Turbo Drives

[MagicianKagu]

Hi folks, I just bought a Z240 with 2x HP Turbo drives. My intent was to RAID0 these two already-fast drives to maximize IO and throughput. However the system came installed in non-RAID mode with Windows 10 loaded only on 1st drive. 2nd one is available but simply, blank.

I now have a decision to make, before fully configuring the OS and applications, I could:

a) Erase installed OS and create a new RAID0 array, then reload OS and everything

b) Keep on using and leverage 2nd drive for additional capacity only.

Question to the forum and experts is, from Z240 service manual, I gather that the RAID option on this system is Intel RST and is software only, with implications on CPU use.

Do you think Intel RST RAID0 can really improve performance on already 0.7ms latency 2GB/sec throughput single Turbo Drive configuration if I went to 2xHP Turbo Drive with it? 

If yes, I'll go the trouble of rebuilding the OS -- if not, I'll keep things as they are. Thank you for any guidance and recommendations.

[DGroves · Accepted solution]

why are you thinking of raid-0 ?, it will not really provide any speed increases in your hardware setup and will decrease reliability since the  bus is allready saturated by just the one SSD's data xfer rate with NVME, and even more so if using SATA

if you want faster data xfers, then you will need dual PCI-e x4 based nvme drives, and even this setup has limited speed increases in most day to day use patterns

[MagicianKagu]

Thank you for the suggestions there. I was thinking of RAID0 because the system is being backed up on a daily basis with no local data; all I care about is highest possible performance on general productivity apps where I deal with large files; video, spreadsheets, large ZIP archives alike. Sounds like gain will not be comparable to that of spinning disks in terms of difference between single and dual disk in Raid0; so I'm proceeding with RAID1 implemented through Windows dynamic disks.

I have created a small striped volume to store some TEMP files and redirected system environment variable to that path; so that some apps offload IO over there just in case.

I'm quite happy with the performance of the system at the moment.