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Super Fast NVMe RAID Comes To Threadripper (zdnet.com)
Adrian Kingsley-Hughes, writing for ZDNet: A week later than planned, AMD has released a free driver update for the X399 platform to support NVMe RAID. The driver allows X399 motherboards to combine multiple NVMe SSDs together into a RAID 0, 1, or 10 array, which will greatly enhance disk performance or data integrity. Benchmarking carried out by AMD shows that the platform allows for a throughput of 21.2GB/s from six 512GB Samsung 960 Pro NVMe SSDs in RAID0. But there are a couple of caveats. The first is that X399 motherboards will require BIOS updates before they will support NVMe RAID, so when it will be available for your system will depend on your motherboard vendor. The second -- and perhaps more important -- is that currently the NVMe RAID driver is in beta, and as such things may go wrong, so you might want to test this before rolling it out onto systems you rely on.
While it's annoying that I had to push the Threadripper upgrade further down the line, at least AMD is polishing the hell out of it until I'm ready to buy. Ir Zen2 will be a thing by then and everything starts anew :D.
This is the biggest draw for me to the Threadripper hardware...all those lanes. For folks who are willing to spend the money on fast storage[lots of fast storage] 64 lanes is where its at.
I bought my first Samsung 950 Pro about six months ago and it has made me a believer. Nothing had more of an impact performance wise than that upgrade.
Still going to use ZFS...
Why would you lock yourself into some special driver to access your stuff, instead of just using your OS?
Probably because intel's platform sucks and doesn't have enough PCIe lanes. You know when AMD released threadripper, intel execs collectively shit their pants.
I assume they're talking about bootable nvme fakeraid, which I think is underrated. Still, I've had regular trouble getting operating systems to work with it. I don't know why that is. It's enthusiast level stuff, not bleeding edge supercomputer stuff.
on any pci-e cpu or chipset or just chipset pci-e?
still better then intel that is intel disk only + DMI feed chipset only that also needs a $$ raid key.
Pretty Please
I have mod points and I am not afraid to use them
Probably because intel's platform sucks and doesn't have enough PCIe lanes. You know when AMD released threadripper, intel execs collectively shit their pants.
On the Intel side, NVMe looks like a gimmick. The ASRock X399 Taichi motherboard has three NVMe and eight SATA ports. I like those specs. I don't like the price. A $340 consumer-grade motherboard is too pricy for a file server.
bios fake raid sucks and needs a driver to hide the disks from the os.
you are better at least on Linux with os level software raid or an hardware raid card that only shows the os the raided disk and does not need to hide the backing disks with a driver.
muilt node ceph better can do update with reboots with no storage down time.
Different solution space. Object Storage should be built on stable filesystems, like ZFS.
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I guess the low end RAID stuff has changed a lot these days. I haven't played with it these days with the speeds that SSDs have now. only ever used RAID 0 with a proper backup solution to speed up the spinning rust. I remember back in the day of the ultra66 to fasttrack 66 hacks where with the modified firmware the raided drives were presented to the OS and a single drive. These things appeared to be doing real hardware raid but only RAID 1 and 0. They didn't have the co processor support for RAID 5
OK, before you go off on the usual rant against "fake RAID", ask yourself what alternative you're advocating. We're talking about NVMe SSD's here - the kind that insert directly into a PCIe or M.2 slot. They are not SSD's with a SAS or SATA interface, so they cannot be attached to a hardware RAID controller.
Personally I'm very happy to have BIOS support for using these devices in a RAID configuration, and it doesn't bother me at all that "OMG - A DRIVER IS REQUIRED!".
Looks like Broadcom's Ventura controller supports MegaRAID style h/w raid for NVMe.
intel boards share chipset pci-e lanes with sata all down linked from cpu over DMI.
Threadripper has NVME on cpu pci-e lanes.
Linux software RAID, obviously. If Windows software RAID weren't such a fucking joke it'd be an option too.
OMG - A DRIVER IS REQUIRED!
well with out a driver the os sees it as 2 disks and not 1 raided disk.
1) M.2 can be SATA, and there exists adapters. https://www.newegg.com/Product...
2) I don't see any technical reason a RAID controller can't connect NVMe disks.
Nice! Four M.2 SSD's in a PCIe x16 slot.
... this is about a whole RAID implementation, which is redundant to what any decent operating system contains anyway, in a probably much more mature state.
And yes, of course you can boot from a RAID configured via "mdadm", if that is what you really need.
First off you bottleneck on the SATA portion of the chip-set at 6Gbps. The SATA over nvme m.2 operated by bridging the SATA controller data stream over a pci-e link. Secondly nvme is is an entirely different block layer, which the kernel expect to be directed to the drive controller. A controller in the middle is going to double latency and minimum and would have to redesigned for the different protocol. Possible but still I ask why?
Performance being equal, and no special cards on X399 motherboards to use it (Since Intel's X299 MB onboard M.2 slots connect through DMI/chipset PCI-E lanes) or an expensive VROC "Key" to enable features makes this a no-brainer.
Goodbye Intel.
I was just pointing out the claim no m.2 raid controller. I agree, that would be a silly thing to do.
You're wrong and 10 years out of date.
It is not fake raid as the CPU since 2009 does I/O. With hardly any latency at all compared to going through a bus and being limited by it's speed and slow latency for the overhead.
CPU I/O raid is superior in almost everyway with the exception of battery backup in case of a power failure. It isn't 2003 anymore
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I have trouble trusting hardware RAID. Like OS-based RAID, it uses software (firmware to be precise) that can have bugs, but it is much less tested than OS-based RAID.
Moreover, disaster recovery requires to have the same hardware/firmware ready for replacement, otherwise you risk your hardware RAID to be inaccessible from a replacement machine.
RAID-0 isn't RAID, because there's no redundancy.
SSDs aren't really inexpensive.
So what are you left with? ADs! Yes, thanks for the ads /.
Incidentally, why would anybody want to use something labled as "beta" for RAID-0?
Yeah, but when it's out of beta it'll be PERFECT.
Talk about naive...
It was worse on my motherboard. If you used one of the NVMe connectors you lost 4 SATA ports. If you used two of the NVMe connectors, you lost all 6. With both in RAID, it was also bottlenecked via the DMI->CPU connect and limited to 4GB/s (in theory), and in practice it was closer to 3.4GB/s. I had multiple Samsung 950 PROs in a RAID-0, and it wasn't worth it the hassle, so I replaced both with a larger single Samsung 960 PRO.