AMD to Release NVMe RAID Support September 25th

Don't flame me, but I have a question: under what circumstances does it make sense to go RAID on M2?
I've read an interesting article a couple of years ago @TH where they clearly stated that other than benchmarking there was no gain.
Of couse they could be wrong/outdated.
Also, can you have TRIM support on the RAID?

 

afaik unless you have pcie ssd's in slots on x99.x299, there was no gain since all of the chipset io is restricted to pcie 3.0 x4 total bandwidth of which i believe most boards connect nvme drives to, thread ripper doesn't have this issue, since it can support 3 native pcie 3.0x4 nvme drives directly connected to the cpu in most board configurations, remains to be seen however what kind of performance scaling you can get from it and whether it even matters (who would really need > 2.5-3gb/s anyway).

 

What, AMD not selling a key to unlock it?

I personally don't see the benefits of putting NVMe drives in RAID, but I don't deal with large amounts of data. At least people will stop complaining about it now.

 

Well what was the reason that RAID was invented in first place? Backups, if one drive fails - you can replace it with new one without loosing data.

In nutshell: if you want really hi-speed fail-safe option.

 

Well, other than you know, the benefits of RAID Redundancy and data security...

 

The ability to have 4+GB/s of read on SSD would be nice...

 

People are so petty sometimes. Oh boo-hoo, so what if M.2 didn't have RAID? Despite the slap in the face from Intel's X299 RAID situation, that didn't stop anyone from buying it, because anyone who actually cares about real-world performance and data integrity/backups will not depend on RAID. On M.2, you'll lose performance in most tasks with RAID, due to reduction in latency.

Somehow, people are forgetting these are quad-channel DDR4 boards. There are 128GB modules. If you want sheer write speeds, go for a RAM disk. Even sequential writes on a RAID0 M.2 array will pale in comparison. Meanwhile, the latency will be even better than a single M.2 drive.

These PCs are going to cost at least $2000 - might as well go all-out.

EDIT:
Also, for anyone who wanted RAID on NVMe drives, why didn't they just go for software RAID? I highly doubt the motherboards come with an integrated hardware controller, so CPU usage is going to go up regardless. Not that it matters - what else are you going to do with all those threads?

 

Real-time 8k video editing (ACES workflow, 8k, 16 bit EXR, 60 fps = 4 GB/s), VR-sets that don't fit in RAM. When you put 3 samsung 960 pro of 2 TB (with 25% overprovisioning) in raid 0(4,5 TB) you can achieve sequential R/W performance of 4.5 GB/s and 150.000 IOPS which should be enough for big VR-sets of around 15 minutes.

 

Schmidtbag is becoming my hero.
i fully planned on a 64gb set of ram for the threadripper 1900x (cannibalizing 32gb and buying another 32gb) for use as a ram disk.
and don't cha know - that will help gaming load times as well (tho i'd be playing as well as compiling, editing, or using my music suite at the same time - because its possible now).


i hope availability is good both for 1900x and aorus gaming 7

 

Someone's salty.

 

A bit ironic of a statement, considering I'm making fun of the people who are salty that they paid for a product with a [mostly] useless feature that wasn't available until a little bit later.

I don't see what's salty about what I said, specifically, the statement you quoted.

 

I guess, but cloud storage and system backups will generally take care of things on that front. I'd be more worried about data redundancy when it comes to long-term storage, but I never store that kind of data on my boot drive - my boot drive is strictly for the OS and applications. What I care about when it comes to the boot drive is speed, and I'm skeptical as to whether NVMe RAID would noticeably boost loading times.

Still, a feature is a feature, and free stuff is always nice. I suppose I could try it out when they release the update, assuming I can get my hands on another 960 Evo.

 

No flame at all but I will answer this as someone that has NVMe RAID on 2 different systems as boot devices.

With RAID 1 you get both ~2X read speed (the reads are distributed) and obviously additional security from being able to survive a drive failure. You do pay the 50% drive space penalty though so this is a niche use case where $ is not really an issue.

The place where it seems noticeable is booting, splash vanish -> desktop is over in a flash. You are right though, in the majority of situations you are talking are the difference between faster than you can perceive and even faster than you can perceive so you really can't tell.

BTW, you should see how fast Windows 10 (bloatware free) Installs from an SanDisk Extreme Pro 3.1 onto 2 960 Pros in raid, its like watching a fake simulation of an install.

 

I really like my Samsung 960 pro but Ets2 + Promods still takes an age to load so it would be good if raid helped,

 

Amazing! Man I love AMD these days, so the X399 platform and mobos are perfect now.

Cool, I am going to run RAID1 on 2 NVME drives for my work drive/setup. I can't wait.

 

I am going to 100% use a RAID1 NVME setup for my game development work drive. When I work on my game engine and my game I can not afford to have a SSD or in this case a M.2 drive die on me while I work. I could be working on a bug for weeks and if I am about to fix it and then a drive dies it would be catastrophic. Of course I back up the drives but it is the real time work that is crucial to protect. Pretty much I have to work in RAID1 all the time, and with the speed of a M.2 NVME combined with Visual Studio and a half a million lines of code it is a amazing setup. Not to mention having all those 32 logical cores when you debug your game engine and game.

In short for a person like me that does game dev all day and also is a hard core gamer when I don't work having the option for a RAID1 M.2 setup and a third slot for you game drive is a amazing/perfect setup. AMD just made my day!

 

Hmmm they can manage to put out raid drivers for nvme on x399 but still can't provide a trim enabled raid driver for the 990FX chipset

 

I have yet to see any firmware or hardware RAID controller officially support TRIM. Do you know of any that does? Because otherwise your complaint is somewhat irrelevant.
If you're using Windows 7, you should know the OS is the real problem here. Windows 7 doesn't support TRIM on non-SATA IDE/AHCI controllers, period. Hardware RAID I'm not sure about - I guess that depends on the controller.
Windows 10 can do TRIM on RAID, but I don't know what the limitations are.
If you're running Linux, in most cases there is some way to force-enable TRIM, even on drives that aren't SSDs. Software RAID in general allows you to use TRIM.

If you insist on RAID'ing SSDs, take the easy way out and go with software RAID. Have a separate SSD for your boot drive (which will boot faster than a RAID0 array anyway). Remember - X399 comes with an integrated controller, so it's likely just firmware RAID. The only reason to use firmware RAID over software is if you intend to boot from the drive. Software RAID is otherwise better in every way. It allows your array to be portable, it should allow you to use TRIM, you don't have to worry about drivers, and it works on systems that don't support RAID.