this post was submitted on 03 Aug 2023
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I want to dual boot W11 with Arch on my Raid 0 setup (self.linux_gaming)
submitted 1 year ago by Moc to c/linux_gaming
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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?

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[–] Zeron 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

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.

[–] Moc 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] Zeron 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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.

[–] matrixrunner 1 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

I used to dualboot windows and Void/Gentoo 2 years back. Windows screwed up something every now and then

So i got fed up with it and bought a new ssd and life has been so much easier.

Right now ssd prices are very low it seems. So if you can afford it - buying one is a no-brainer.

[–] just_another_person 2 points 1 year ago

The general steps to do this are:

  1. shrink your W11 partition and leave enough room for a Linux install plus games
  2. Boot a LiveCD to check if everything works and you can view your Raid Array
  3. Install Linux distro in new free space
[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

If you do decide to go with a dual boot, I highly recommend rEFInd.

Just gives you a slightly prettier OS selection bootloader.

https://www.rodsbooks.com/refind/

[–] hohoho 1 points 1 year ago

I found this to be more or less impossible on my AM4 platform. The AMD RAID kernel module didn’t work under any distro. Fire up an Ubuntu live environment and see if you can detect and read the contents of your Windows environment. That should give you a good sense for what is possible. Otherwise I recommend installing to a separate NVME as I have.