AMD to Release NVMe RAID Support for X399 September 25th

#5468136 Posted on: 08/31/2017 02:19 PM

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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Of couse they could be wrong/outdated.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?

#5468145 Posted on: 08/31/2017 02:38 PM

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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Of couse they could be wrong/outdated.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).

#5468151 Posted on: 08/31/2017 02:52 PM

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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.

#5468158 Posted on: 08/31/2017 03:00 PM

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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Of couse they could be wrong/outdated.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?

I hardly can think of a consumer / user end scenario where you'd need to much write/read performance (if coming from one fast m2 unit), redundancy maybe. It became a bit of a thing with a click-bait article on the web, Intel had it AMD did not and then the flood-gates opened up.

Then again, for pro usage, video editing / content creation / virtualization with databases, that could be a help.In the end it's another good feature, but one that consumers would hardly use imho.

#5468163 Posted on: 08/31/2017 03:28 PM

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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?

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.

#5468172 Posted on: 08/31/2017 03:53 PM

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

#5468174 Posted on: 08/31/2017 03:54 PM

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

#5468189 Posted on: 08/31/2017 04:37 PM

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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?

#5468236 Posted on: 08/31/2017 07:20 PM

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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?

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.

#5468253 Posted on: 08/31/2017 08:15 PM

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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).
:p

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

#5468256 Posted on: 08/31/2017 08:35 PM

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Someone's salty.

#5468258 Posted on: 08/31/2017 08:42 PM

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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 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.

#5468260 Posted on: 08/31/2017 08:59 PM

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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.

#5468281 Posted on: 08/31/2017 11:02 PM

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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?

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.

#5468305 Posted on: 09/01/2017 01:18 AM

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