Hello, I have recently built an AM5 pc and loaded Windows 11 onto it. I have two M.2 SSDs setup with RAID 0, through the UEFI.
I want to install dual boot a Linux distro to try and play games on it, because I prefer Linux to Windows.
From where I am with W11 and RAID 0 setup, how can I dual boot Arch, for example?
Should I (can I) partition my RAID0 drive?
Dual booting to a single drive(or an array) is a recipe for disaster. You’d be much better off putting each OS on it’s own separate drive, and setting arch as the boot distro since grub will allow you to switch to windows if need be. Windows has a tendency to screw with boot partitions so it’s more trouble than it’s worth to install it “alongside” on a single drive/raided drives.
RAID0 on nvme barely does anything anyways(especially for gaming,) if anything it’s worse as it makes some of the lower que depth operations(and latency) slower.
So to your question, you can in theory, but ideally you shouldn’t.
This. 👆
I’m committed right now to a Win 10 AME and EndeavourOS Dual Boot, and back when I first started running such a setup, Windows (8, 8.1, 10) would always overwrite the boot sector with it’s own loader when installed. You can get a dual boot from grub working by deliberately partitioning before installing Windows, then whichever Linux, making sure to install grub during. I gave up on that hassle after one round and now I just use separate drives for each OS.
I actually benchmarked my Samsung 980 Pro M.2 Raid 0 setup vs a single. While sequential read-write is between 2-3* better, random is exactly the same except for 1.8* better random write speed.
Which is why you generally don’t want NVME raid. You’ll never, ever use that much sequential in a consumer environment, and game loading mostly uses random reads rather than sequential. What makes an OS feel snappy and responsive is the lower que depths(i.e q1t1,) which actually get worse or stay about the same when you raid flash together.
The only time i feel like raiding them together is worth it is if you’re lazy and want one big storage blob, or if you have unique circumstances that demand ridiculous amounts of ingest speed, like with 4k footage.