New system build

Do you plan to use RAID?

Do you plan to use an Optane Memory module to accelerate the performance of a SATA HDD?

Do you plan to use an Optane SSD?

If the answer to all three of these questions is No, then you do not need to enable or install RST at all. Once upon a time, the Intel Storage driver in RST would get you slightly better performance than the  Storage driver that was provided with Windows 7. In fact, with Windows 10, the performance of the Storage drivers is on par and there is no advantage to using RST at all (well, unless the answer to one of those questions had been Yes).

Now, that was a discussion related to SATA technology. When it comes to NVMe technology, the performance is pretty much the same. Now, everyone gets excited about using RAID0 with two M.2 NVMe SSDs to maximize the throughput. I don't think it is worth it. Let me explain. In order for RST to support RAID operations with two M.2 NVMe SSDs, the PCIe lanes that are used to support the two M.2 NVMe SSDs must be downstream of the chipset (the PCH component). Why? Because RST is implemented within the PCH. Let's do the math:

So what happens when you connect two of these drives and use RAID between them? Do you get any better throughput? Well, yes, you get a bit because of the interleaving, but you never get anywhere near the doubling that everyone is excited about. Bottom line, a non-starter for me.

BTW, I do hope that that was a M.2 NVMe drive that you purchased. Using a M.2 SATA drive is a waste of a good M.2 connector.

...S