It looks like my i9 machine with 32GB of ram and 4 x 512gb SSDs is finally coming!  I know this has probably been discussed many times before (sorry about that) but i am looking at replacing two of the 512 drives (3 and 4) with 2TB Samsung 970 Evo Plus units.  

Can anyone see any issues with this?  Would an alternative drive (Sabrent) be better?

I am only a causal gamer, but want a really high powered PC for work (CAD and graphics etc).

Many thanks in anticipation.

Matt

Thank you so much for the message and info.  

I do have a nas drive etc... the reason why I have ordered this machine is that the laptop will be an almost exact clone of my desktop  syncing all files as my current laptop does.

I am thinking that it would be a good idea to just not have the c drive a raid 0.  Do you think I can change this?  Presumably the other drive would be drive d and then the others e and f pretty much like my current desktop.

I have purchased the large m.2 drives which hopefully will be fine for done time to come. 

I appreciate any comments on the raid 0 etc.  Like you say when it is new it is easy to do.... leave it for a few months and it is a pain.  

Once again many thanks. 

Matt

Hi @mattgod69 thank you for sharing your contribution.

RAID 0 (striping) shares information 50 50 on either of the two drives, so if one drive becomes unrecoverable the other drive only has half the shared information and becomes useless. Drives do not last indefinitely, and some fail early. Having reached End Of Life, these drives cannot be formatted. 

There are many articles on the internet that will explain all the RAID levels that are intended for servers. Modern Personal Computers use Solid State Drives and the fast/ultrafast NVMe drives derive no enhanced performance or reliability from being in the RAID 0 configuration. 

Getting a new system is exciting and time consuming when customised with your applications for its intended use. When the OS(C:) boot drive is fully functional, its time to clone a standby OS(C:) boot drive. 

RAID 1 (mirroring) creates a copy on the second drive, it will also copy all the faults if not managed correctly. Getting a NAS (Network Attached Storage) for your home business might be a good archive option for private and commercially sensitive information, when your laptop is frequently being used on your travels and cloud storage access is not reliable. 

Generally the 1TB and 2TB NVMe storage cards provide the best read/write speeds. It is OK to use lower storage capacity drives for the OS(C:) boot drive, just make sure it always has plenty of room for temporary files. 

All of this system configuration should be explored very early so that late configuration changes are not an inconvenience. For most users this configuration discussion is mute. 

There is no issues with having a 2Tb drive in each slot but I think that’s the limit for each slot. So in total if you had 512 + 512 + 2000 + 2000 it basically means that you would have 5Tb of storage in total in SSDs. And a Sabrent would be fine because basically anything that is an M.2 SSD and has a maximum of 2Tb or less will work.

I forgot if this is a thing on Alienware laptops but have you considered RAID 1+0? It has the speed of 0 and reliability of 1. 

Hi @mattgod69 thank you for sharing update. 

Am I correct in speculating that your Alienware Area-51m R2 model has interposer Sled board and thereby four M.2 slots for PCIe Gen3 x4 NVMe cards? 

Alienware Area-51m R2 with interposer Sled board

If Yes, use Macrium Reflect Free to clone (copy) RAID 0 to single M.2 NVMe card on the Sled board. Then you have RAID 0 and single NVMe as your OS(C:) boot drive, but only install one of these OS(C:) boot drive options or the system will be very confused. Make sure that single NVMe is created with GPT partition format so that it can use the BIOS Boot list option UEFI. 

When ready, you may decide to format the two RAID 0 cards as single Data drives. 

Can you change the Raid... i guess leaving raid 0 is fine but if there is no performance increase surely i am better having the OS on just one and the using the second one for storage.  why do Dell do this?  Now they have configured Raid 0 i guess that the os is spread over the two disks.... i think ill leave as is..... lol ... sounds like it would be a pain to change?

i will have 4 TB of storage which should be fine.  i will check everything works and then swap out the old slot 3 and 4 drives for the new 2 TB versions.

Does anyone have any better ideas?

Cheers.

Hi @mattgod69 it seems that our posts were undertaken at a similar time. As described in my earlier post, creating a single drive OS(C:) boot drive is very easy on your four slot model. Creating clone (copy) should be accomplished in under 20 minutes, if the preparations have already been completed. 

thank you for the message... exactly what i want to achieve.  I may also remove the raid 0 which wont change the storage initially but i could then change slot 2 to a 2tb unit as well.  5TB should be fine though so i might not bother.  it seems a bit complicated to do this.... i know i will be keen to get the system up and running!

Hi @crimsom, yes, i think my Alienware Area-51m R2 model has either 4 slots on the main board or the interposer Sled board.  It is shipping with 4 M.2 PCIe Gen3 x4 NVMe cards (512Mb each). 

I think chaging slots 3 and 4 from 512Mb to 2TB should be fairly easy.... even though i am a little nervous about opening up a band new pc lol.

2TB Samsung 970 Evo Plus are M.2 PCIe Gen 3.0 x 4, NVMe 1.3 cards with Read/Write 3,500/3,300 MB/s Speeds. These are suitable for Alienware Area-51m R2 internal slots. 

Changing from RAID 0 to Single NVME OS(C:) boot drive has already replied to your post in Re: Area-51m R2, Storage Upgrade - Dell Community 

Check out if this works for you.

https://www.alienowners.com/threads/setting-up-a-raid-on-most-alienware-systems-how-to.1952/

but if it doesn’t I’ll message some intel Raid setup tutorials.

Thanks to @DELL-Chris M for within hours, combining discrete posting, into single thread.