One of the big stories at Computex this year was about removing the bottlenecks from high speed
M.2 to NVMe SSDs pretty much every motherboard was bristling with mounts and
Partners like asus even showed off this
Crazy card that could hold 4 drives at a time for a theoretical 16
gigabytes per second of throughput
So when Samsung approached us to sponsor a video showing off their flagship?
960 Pro we had plenty of inspiration
for how to build the awesomest dream
SSD raid setup
Unfortunately getting it to actually work
has been... Well
an adventure. Yeah
lets put it that way
Now as the de facto choice for Speed Freaks for the entire past year Samsung's 960 pro needs no introduction
But they sponsored this video, so we're gonna do it anyway. Each of our four drives has
512 gigs of V-NAND storage is rated to a blazing fast 3,500 megabytes per second reads and
2100 megabytes per second writes has a custom 5 core Samsung processor onboard
and A five-year warranty and somehow the whole thing is the size of a stick of gum
So then let's go let's plug them all in and rip up some benchmark scores right
wrong
Finding a board with enough slots was the first challenge we had to solve
I thought I saw one at Computex that had 5, but that turned out to be a figment of my imagination
So we settled then on the asus prime x 299 deluxe with a separate PCI Express card to handle the last
M dot 2 but one small problem as cool as it is to run Windows software raid for eye
watering sequential performance numbers that has been done to death and
Besides we wanted to actually
Experience the speed in day-to-day use so that means that we need to boot
Windows from our array
let's talk about intel's virtual raid on CPU or
vrock
Since the latest skylake x high-end desktop processors share much of their pedigree with server level xeon chips they
Actually have three
What are called volume management devices built in each of which can give up to four PCIe 4x?
devices direct access to the CPU for high bandwidth low latency performance
Cool the issue though is that today?
Is not yet officially launched and making matters worse
Intel is rumored to be planning to enable the feature with a hardware key
that will only be available through bundles with X 299 motherboards or
SSDs
Thankfully though AMD decided to ride in on a white steed and save the day by announcing a free
driver update and
Sadly yes their marketing materials specifically emphasized the free part. That's the world we live in now
Which would enable bootable nvme raid on the X?
399 thread Ripper platform, so a quick swap to the Asus zenith extreme, and we are ready to
Cry on the desk
because AMD pulled the software almost immediately after the announcement due to
Compatibility issues once. It was finally re-released. We then had to bundle our way through the
incredibly poorly documented process of a
Loading the AMD nvme controller driver which allows B
The AMD rate controller driver to be installed, which allows C. The AMD raid
configuration driver to be installed
Then even when we were in Windows running on four SSDs. We hit another roadblock
Our Iometer benchmark results were nowhere near what AMD posted on their blog
So after still more research mad props to Gary from asus by the way, man
We figured out that because of thread Ripper CPU is technically two separate dies
linked by AMD's infinity fabric interconnect
Considerations must be made to ensure that the nvme load is balanced between the dies
Otherwise this 11 gigabyte per second link as fast as it is could actually become a bottleneck
So armed with a detailed diagram of PCIe Lane allocations and a pre-release bios. We pushed onward
Meanwhile though. We actually hadn't given up entirely on vrock
Now while I wouldn't recommend getting your Intel drivers from Russian download mirrors
Did find one that claimed to enable vrock without a raid key, and actually it technically worked?
But our performance numbers were way off
compared to the guys at PC perspective who also got vrock working via what we think was a similar method and
Anyway, neither of us could get it to boot with non Intel SSDs
So back to AMD thread Ripper then which for better or for worse has bootable raid today
AMD got back to us with a preset for iometer and some guidance to help us replicate their results
Not while actually booted from it mind you but with a raw as an unformatted file system
And we implemented everything meaning that it is finally time to do this
So after physically balancing the for samsung 960 pros between the dies
Using a asus's dimm.2 for two of them, and they're hyper m
.2 x16 card for the other two we booted in pure UEFI mode and
Configured our array using the built-in raid expert 2 utility
We then f6 to all three drivers
In order and saw our two terabyte array as available for OS installation
once booted into Windows we launch iometer with one megabyte reads and writes at
32 Q depth and had to rub our eyes at the results 12 gigabytes per second on reads and
7.3. Gigabytes per second on writes and that is without AMD's BS raw filesystem stuff
We are talking a fully operational
NTFS formatted
bootable array with those kinds of numbers
for comparison a single 960 Pro delivered three and a half gigabytes per second on reads and
Two gigabytes per second on writes in the same machine now crystal disk mark didn't scale quite as well on reads
But we do have to keep in mind that this technology is still in its infancy
At least on the driver side and we might actually see
More of the raw hardware's potential unlocked in the future
So thanks to Samsung for sponsoring this X raishin of high-end bootable raid on the desktop
I don't think this crazy ride is quite over yet, but we're gonna take a little breather
And then maybe we'll revisit it once things have settled down particularly on the Intel side over the next few months
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