Z690 Raid Setup Guide 

Incredible, I was searching RU-vid to learn how to do exactly this all last night, for a build I’m doing today. Impeccable timing - thanks, Wendell!

Excellent video. Clear, concise and well structured. Also, very well timed as a lot of people are now moving to Z690 and probably struggling with how to setup RAID (as I was!). Thanks!

Amazing that you can put all of *that* into comprehensive video!

Mirroring all of the other comments, this was exactly what I was looking for, great, concise, informative video. Thanks!

Thank you so much for taking the time to go through all this information. It's exactly what i needed and couldn't find anywhere else on the Internet. Also shame on vendors like MSI who can't even put basic details in information in their documentation to help people understand these things!

This was actually the reason I wanted to try Z690 in the first place. I have two Gen4 1TB in RAID 0 and honestly, while watching Crystal Disk Mark go crazy is kind of amusing, I honestly can't tell the difference in normal usage. I also couldn't get it to work in Linux yet either (tried Fedora & Manjaro).

It'd be cool to benchmark latency penalty on VROC. I'm willing to bet that money is best spent on a single large TLC PCIe gen 4 x4 SSD.

Thank you for this, I used it when I first setup raid on my z690, didn’t realize they called it VMD now, and again when I upgraded to a single drive and couldn’t figure out why my system wouldn’t see it (had to turn off VMD again)

An idea for a chipset RAID test: How does the platform react if one NVMe drive of a redundant volume fails? SATA is quite easy-going regarding hot-plugging but I have seen Windows systems crashing with a BSoD when a PCIe NVMe SSD gets disconnected even if it’s a data storage volume only.

This is great! I was just thinking of setting this up on my Z690 board. However, I was wondering, what do you do when you update your BIOS? When I update my BIOS (Z690 Aorus Master), it resets all my BIOS settings, including RAID... I've lost a lot of data that way in the past...

Its amazing how awesome this new Z690 platform is, especially considering how poor even X299 was. Thanks AMD! :D

man smooth as butter .. great job and nice explanation. Just what driver were you talking about after windows install? Would you paste me a link please? I am using 2 x Sk Hynix p41 1tb in raio0.

What i'd like is an ITX board, with 16 vertical slots for M.2 (2240) for a 1U half width portable file server with up to 3TB per slot(2 dies on the front, one on the back)

So...Does this work properly with Optane M10? There seem to be a sh*t ton of 16 and 32GB M.2 modules on Ebay 🙂

After wasting 5hours with Settings on Z690 Aorus Extreme with no luck decided to RU-vid, and voila! Thanks.

How weird. Been experiencing brownouts here tonight due to a storm outside, then in this here video (recorded on the wrong-side of the pond and however many days ago) you're lights are dying too. Spoooooky! 😀

Fast storage is useful. But somehow way less impression than those old tape libraries with the little robots whipping around in them. If only there were a way to have BOTH nvme raid AND little robots lol

Finally!!!! Intel VROC working the way that it was supposed to. It's too bad that it's taken them this long to get it working like pretty much ANY OTHER RAID implementation, but yay for them for finally catching up.

Having been screwed in the past by hardware RAID, when the m/b died, and could not get replacement anythings... What do I get with this that I can't get with ZFS (or DMD)?

Nice video Wendell. I can't find the guide on forums. Is it up?

Thanks you for sharing your expertise Wendell !

I see wendell, i click.

Never done RAID before. Have a MSI Z690 board with 4X - 1TB 980Pros ... Looking to do a RAID10 setup. I'm assuming I need to make an image of my OS drive on a backup drive elsewhere if I want to keep my stuff? Looks like this requires me to re-install my OS correct?

Hey Wendell, does this have to be configured with a fresh install of Windows? Would a typical raid zero configuration be sufficient enough in order to “replace” the performance features of items such as AI OC? How well would windows perform with a standard raid zero, XMP II profile, AND AI OC three way configuration? I’m trying to enlighten myself with this z690 optimization, because it would put my mind to ease of having to worry about a potentially unstable OC that was configured by ASUS’ firmware. I was honestly thinking that my Samsung 980s in raid zero + XMP II would create a sufficient workaround for AI OC, and potentially create an insanely fast and reliable directstorage-gaming/workstation (CAD) in the near future. Thank you for introducing me , substantially well, to my systems untapped potential.

Five m.2 slots with the MSI Unify is awesome, but I beg to differ that four m.2 slots in the Gigabyte Aorus Master with the 10G LAN port is the better bang for the buck at the same price because if you choose to use those drives through the network, shouldn't see any bottlenecks.

Just an idee for another experiment: you can try to make a SSD RAID to match RAM speeds. I think the bandwidth is enough for that on Z690.

Hi great video. I have the NZXT z790 mother board with 3 ssd on m2 slots installed. Problem is I can’t get the sata mode selection option for raid. It only shows Achi option. Do you have any idea why? Trying to raid1 2 identical ssd. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks again!

@Level1Techs Great video. Regarding older Intel platforms, I am running right now a bootable RAID-0 volume, using 3 Samsung 970 Pro 1TB M.2 NVMe SSDs on a Gigabyte Z390 Aorus Master motherboard. (So, no Intel drives in my system). I guess, that’s a proof that Gigabyte is ahead of the curve with bleeding edge technologies.

Wendell!!! You missed the perfect, Is that you, God?, moment!!!! Rotfl!!!!

I just threw 4x 32GB M15 Optanes into RAID0 hanging off Z690 just because. Unify-X is great. Totally worth the $100. Just for the lulz.

This is a dumb noob question, but what's the benefit of using the motherboard's RAID rather than doing it in Windows (via partition manager/storage spaces) if it isn't the boot drive?

128K strip size? Are you avoiding block misalignment?

I have the ASUS Maximus Hero (Z690). It has 6 SATA ports, but only the first 4 can be used for boot devices and RST RAID. The last 2 can't be used for boot devices or RST RAID I had to download the manual to get that info. It doesn't say that anywhere in the regular specs.

Thx for this tutorial, time saver

Thank you so much for this great video. I wouldn't have gotten as far as I have without your help. One question: Is it possible to use both NVMe and SATA drives connected to the same Z690 board when VMD is enabled? I have 2 x NVMe drives and 2 x SATA drives. When VMD is disabled, I see all four drives. When VMD is enabled, I only see the NVMe drives; the SATA drives are missing. I spoke to MSI support and they basically said "it's broken" and blamed Intel. At this point I'm just trying to determine if this is a configuration issue that I can fix, or a baked-in hardware/firmware/etc. issue that one of the vendors needs to fix.

So, can Gygabyte Z690M also be used for RAID mirroring as C: bootable? What is the difference between Z690 and Z690M?

i see what you are saying now, gigabyte because of the way they present the options lumps sata raid under vmd on/off but on other boards you can have sata raid and vmd all off.

I got Samsung M.2 SSD 980 pro TB (it's where my OS win 11 pro installed). And Samsung 840 EVO 1TB, My M.2 is recognize as RAID instead of ACHI. I did everything (including updating BIOS), but I can't change it to ACHI. Do you know how to fix it? Thanks!

For anybody trying this with Z690/Z790 motherboard (especially MSI and Gigabyte), be careful updating the BIOS as it could mess up the raid configuration.

Amazing video and great walkthrough! However, no matter what I do I can not get my Windows installer (win 10) to install ANY of the RAID drivers (f6 folder or otherwise). Finally created my raid array just fine in bios (was a PITA). But my "Asus z690-plus wifi" (ddr5 mem) will NOT accept any type of raid drivers I throw at it to see my NVMe drives (I have 2 raided and 1 not in a raid array). Been dealing with Asus for over a week now and the support they offer is the biggest joke ever.

hey i have this issue where windows installer wont detect the storage device after i put it in raid and i was wondering if you could help me with that

Are mobo raids actually getting better now? _engagement_

Hi Wendell I have a problem I was wondering if you could help with? I have this exact same board and am trying to migrate a 4x4TB RAID5 volume from my Gigabyte Aorus Z370 Ultra Gaming to the Gigabyte Z690 Gaming X (while also using a Samsung 980 Pro 1TB in the first M.2 slot). I've enabled VMD, disabled VMD global mapping, disabled root port 0/6/0 (because I was getting BSODs and "no disk" errors when Intel RST was trying to manage my 980 Pro) and now: a) success! My 980 Pro is booting into Windows 10 - but Intel RST won't open because it says it isn't enabled (probably because it's not enabled for 0/6/0 b) failure! 4x4TB volume D: not appearing in Windows 10 Strangely, When VMD is disabled the D: RAID5 volume appears in windows explorer but cannot be accessed or modified (it asks me to format it), and Intel RST won't open because it says it was not properly enabled on the motherboard. I'm wondering if I can even migrate my RAID5 array from Z370 to Z690... it was set up through the Z370 BIOS and Intel RST on that board, and WMD/Intel RST is enabled on the SATA controller on Z690. I could re-initialize the RAID5 volume in the Z690 bios, but then I will lose all of my data. What would you suggest?

Hi, do you know why i cannot bring my raid 0 hdds from my z390 to my new z690 msi motherboard? last time i did that i just enable raid and it detects my hdd raid 0, now it detects nothing when i turn on raid mode....

Unlisted?

On a related note AMD still hasn’t done anything about their X570/B550 chipset software RAID banana drivers 😭

So is this the kind of intel raid that vmware ESXi will ignore and just show all drives separately or have Intel actually provided "Real" RAID on this board?

YOU THE MAN...in Z490 is more easy

Rapid store doesent come up what do i do?

The problem is how may I copy old data to new raid1 with vmd

Just did this on a b550... even tho this isnfor intel utnwould have been very nice to have watched this first 😂

How to wnable in aorus z790 elite ddr5

Aqua Steel legend OC formula

I wonder if those ssd's would work in the steam deck...

🥶

So..... not Shadow Legends then? ; D

WHERE are the videos of the actual physical mobos ??? I mean where is your proof , wtf

I have 2 of those drives. My problem is a 2230 form factor as my motherboards and laptop only have hole spacing down to 2242.

Almost 80 comments but only 4 likes..... ????????????

Has anyone seen a 7700 packaged up to show as a 7700k in cpu-Z?

You should never store files on a PC, certainly not physically on a PC motherboard.

nooooo. not motherboard/bios raid.

Did AMD cut the power to his key light? Is Kreeeestah a shill, just there to to do AMDs bidding and just so happened to "cut the lights out" right when Wendell was talking good about the blue team? That's ok, we still love you Kreestah....don't hurt me please...again

FOR 12/13TH GEN RAID YOU'LL HAVE TO USE 12/13TH GEN SPECIFIC DRIVER HERE! www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/download/720755/intel-rapid-storage-technology-driver-installation-software-with-intel-optane-memory-11th-up-to-13th-gen-platforms.html?v=t I was pulling my hair out all night trying to get my NVMe Raid 0 to get recognized in windows 11 installation. MSI official support page has the WRONG driver!

Hey when loading that driving during install, you're seeing TWO drivers… "VMD Controller" and "VMD Managed Controller". Both seemed to work for me, but I never successfully booted to my raid drive so I'm not sure.