How exactly do you hotswap an NVMe drive? Or is that more of a misnomer? When I think "hot swapping" I think adding/removing a device while the computer is still operating.

I know in the server segment it actually is possible to hotswap NVMe units. But with a consumer grade M2 .. nope I would not really recommend that.

Hilbert Hagedoorn:

I know in the server segment it actually is possible to hotswap NVMe units. But with a consumer grade M2 .. nope I would not really recommend that.

True, though once you get to server level stuff you can hotswap PCI/PCIe cards, power supplies, and in some rare cases I think you can hotswap CPUs and RAM.

It is not only the m.2 drives you can raid1 with. There are PCIe cards that take m.2 drives or PCIe SSDs like the Intel SSD 750. Perhaps you can do some karate with those.

Amazing! My body is ready 🙂 , AMD owns.

schmidtbag:

True, though once you get to server level stuff you can hotswap PCI/PCIe cards, power supplies, and in some rare cases I think you can hotswap CPUs and RAM.

yes i have worked in a 24/24 7/7 365/365 system for industry, very impressive to change a failed CPU with system ON... but it's like hotswap SATA for normal computer 🙂

Hilbert Hagedoorn:

I know in the server segment it actually is possible to hotswap NVMe units. But with a consumer grade M2 .. nope I would not really recommend that.

it should be tried (not on main system of course)... sometime the surprise is good (and sometime not i agree 🙂 ).

This is how you do marketing. Intel could learn a thing or two, rather than putting out lame excuses all the time.

BLEH!:

This is how you do marketing. Intel could learn a thing or two, rather than putting out lame excuses all the time.

Damn right, raid on Threadripper with 4 m.2 960 pros sounds amazing.

BLEH!:

This is how you do marketing. Intel could learn a thing or two, rather than putting out lame excuses all the time.

It's just a matter of who's the recipient of the excuses. I'm sure AMD's stock owners had to cope with plenty of them during the past years, while Intel's stock owners were drinking champagne with the Intel execs.

BLEH!:

This is how you do marketing. Intel could learn a thing or two, rather than putting out lame excuses all the time.

I agree, though, keep in mind AMD got some flak for being so late support RAID. To my recollection, Intel supported RAID with X299 immediately, though you had to pay extra for full support (which is pretty scummy). AMD's RAID support came relatively late, but they're a lot more generous about it. In general, hardware/firmware RAID with NVMe is pointless for most users anyway (particularly RAID1) - I think it's a very niche case where any home users demand it for a boot drive. Keep in mind even on Intel's platforms, you can still do software RAID.

schmidtbag:

I agree, though, keep in mind AMD got some flak for being so late support RAID. To my recollection, Intel supported RAID with X299 immediately, though you had to pay extra for full support (which is pretty scummy). AMD's RAID support came relatively late, but they're a lot more generous about it. In general, hardware/firmware RAID with NVMe is pointless for most users anyway (particularly RAID1) - I think it's a very niche case where any home users demand it for a boot drive. Keep in mind even on Intel's platforms, you can still do software RAID.

Well, I'm not sure if I'd say they supported it immediately - after all, the VROC key didn't launch with the platform (I'm not even sure of it's availability now). It'd be more accurate to say that they made a lot of noise about it 😉 I didn't care too much about RAID, but seeing der8auer's video has piqued my interest somewhat. I'm already using a Samsung 960 Evo on my X399 system, and have another one of the same capacity in my other system. I dunno - if I get really bored one day then I might just try it.

schmidtbag:

I agree, though, keep in mind AMD got some flak for being so late support RAID. To my recollection, Intel supported RAID with X299 immediately, though you had to pay extra for full support (which is pretty scummy). AMD's RAID support came relatively late, but they're a lot more generous about it. In general, hardware/firmware RAID with NVMe is pointless for most users anyway (particularly RAID1) - I think it's a very niche case where any home users demand it for a boot drive. Keep in mind even on Intel's platforms, you can still do software RAID.

I tend to disagree on that. Personally I'm running an SSD RAID0 and that gives your system a bit more responsiveness. I can imagine that 4 M.2's in RAID0 would boost your video editing speed quite a lot; real-time saving & editing.With so many YouTubers these days making enough money to afford these kind of machines, I can see a decent market for it. RAID1 is for the safety systems; where data preservation is important.

Timoo:

I tend to disagree on that. Personally I'm running an SSD RAID0 and that gives your system a bit more responsiveness.

I find that really hard to believe, but, I welcome benchmarks to prove me wrong. M.2 SSDs are almost as low-level as you can get (besides PCIe SSDs) and offer plenty of bandwidth for everyday tasks. RAID, regardless of the method you choose, will always increase the minimum latency, but, it doesn't always increase transfer rates. Whatever peformance differences you notice could easily come down to: * Specific applications that benefit more from sequential reads/writes. * Faster CPU and/or chipset (chipset doesn't really affect performance as much as it used to, but it can make a difference). * If you're using Windows, having a freshly formatted drive tends to make a big difference. Windows is usually pretty bad at drive maintenance.

I can imagine that 4 M.2's in RAID0 would boost your video editing speed quite a lot; real-time saving & editing.With so many YouTubers these days making enough money to afford these kind of machines, I can see a decent market for it. RAID1 is for the safety systems; where data preservation is important.

Like I said - there are niche uses where RAID is necessary. But except for people who work with high-speed cameras or raw 4K@60FPS content, most video editors aren't going to need even 2x M.2 drives. That being said, most Youtubers don't even do 2K@60FPS, and we all know Hollywood likes to stay below 30FPS. So for most video editors, RAID isn't a necessity. RAID1 or RAID10 is pretty much a necessity if you're handling important data on HDDs, but I find it to be a total waste of money on SSDs. Data integrity and drive failure rates are pretty much a non-issue with modern SSDs. Having separate backups is far more practical while costing less and being less intensive on system resources. RAID1 should never be treated as a backup.