Holy crap! I FINALLY GOT THIS TO WORK AS I WANTED!!! It's late and I'm takin' my booty to bed! Here's the notes I took.......

GOAL: To have both M2 disks in the PCI card to be a single bootable C:\ drive on my Dell Precision Workstation 7920.

This would have been quick and simple if I didn't want them to be OS drives. It also would have been much simpler if I had just used one of the M2s as an OS drive. But by golly I was gonna make this work!!!! One week later....

1) Installing Win11 directly to the drives: Tried to use Windows Storage options to create a single virtual drive (Control Panel-->Storage Spaces). That worked so I started the Win install. After the initial file copy of Win11 and the first reboot, it never came back, didn't see the disks on boot.

2) Cloning the C:\ drive to the M2 virtual drive: I had just installed a base Win11 install on a small old SSD drive as the source disk. Everything appeared to clone OK to the M2s using EaseUS Disk Copy. On first boot after, it didn't see the disk(s). "No boot disk found".

So at this point I saw that in BIOS it always shows the M2s as separate disks and there's nothing Windows can do to change that. I found instructions on how I can RAID 0 the drives from BIOS.

3) Raid configuration: I started walking through the steps of using RAID in BIOS and I see the two M2s in RAID configuration but I cannot create the RAID array as the VROC (Virtual RAID on CPU) settings say "Bypassed". So that sent me down yet another rabbit hole. Turns out Intel has this money laundering racket on their motherboards for allowing people to use RAID. You cannot use RAID unless you have a $100 dongle plugged in to your mobo. Just a stinkin' piece of plastic. So I assume they just want to make their money for people that depend on RAID in a server environment.

3 days later.......

4) Intel dongle showed up. I was able to follow the instructions below and set up a new array from BIOS once that dongle was plugged in.

How to Configure RAID on a Dell Personal Computer
I followed step 3 & 4 - Follow "Newer Systems sold with Windows 8 / 10 installed on UEFI"

So I tried to install Win11 again directly to the disks again on boot. I get the message, "We couldn't find any drives. To get a storage driver, click Load Driver." So it obviously could not see the RAID array on preboot again. Arrggghhhh!!!!

5) Cloning Part Deux - Ran through and booted that old SSD drive like I did on 2) above. It did see the RAID array intact in Disk Management on drive D:\ (good sign). I ran Disk Copy again and crossed my fingers as I shut the machine down. Took out the SSD drive and turned on the machine. FREAKING EUREKA!!!! The damn thing booted straight to Windows. I finally got my way and have a 4TB C:\ drive. I also ran my write test again and it's even a little better than the last test I did:

Originally Posted By: sslechta
PERFORMANCE WRITE TESTING VIA UserBenchmark utility:
C:\ SanDisk Ultra II 960GB - MY INTERNAL STANDARD SSD DRIVE
SusWrite @10s intervals: 374 246 246 211 209 225 MB/s

F:\ Microsoft Storage Space Device 4TB - THE NEW M2 DISKS
SusWrite @10s intervals: 1955 1959 1963 1953 1921 1958 MB/s

C:\ Intel Raid 0 Volume 4TB
SusWrite @10s intervals: 2407 2357 2238 2130 1845 1974 MB/s



Steve

BIAB/RB 2022, Pro Tools 2020, Korg N5, JBL LSR 4328 Powered Monitors, AKG/Shure Mics.
PC: Win11 PRO, 4 TB M2 SSD, 2 TB HD, 128 GB Memory