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one of the big stories at computex this year was about removing the bottlenecks

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from high-speed m.2 NVMe ssds pretty

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much every motherboard was bristling with mounts and partners like ASUS even

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showed off this crazy card that could

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hold four drives at a time for a

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theoretical 16 gigabytes per second of

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throughput so when samsung approached us to sponsor

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a video showing off their flagship 960

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pro we had plenty of inspiration for how

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to build the awesomest dream SSD raid

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setup unfortunately getting it to actually work

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has been well an adventure yeah

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let's put it that way

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now as the de facto choice for speed freaks for the entire past year

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samsung's 960 pro needs no introduction

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but they sponsored this video so we're gonna do it anyway each of our four

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drives has 512 gigs of vnan storage is

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rated to a blazing fast 3 500 megabytes per second reads and 2100 megabytes per

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second writes has a custom five core samsung processor on board and a

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five-year warranty and somehow the whole thing is the size of a stick of gum

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so then let's go let's plug them all in and

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rip up some benchmark scores right wrong finding a board with enough slots

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was the first challenge we had to solve i thought i saw one at computex that had

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five but that turned out to be a figment of my imagination so we settled then on

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the ASUS prime x299 deluxe with a

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separate pci express card to handle the last m.2 but one small problem

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as cool as it is to run Windows software raid for eye-watering sequential

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performance numbers that has been done to death

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and besides we wanted to actually

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experience the speed in day-to-day use

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so that means that we need to boot Windows from our array

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let's talk about Intel's virtual radon CPU or vroc

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since the latest skylakex high-end desktop processors share much of their

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pedigree with server level xeon chips they actually have three what are called

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volume management devices built in each of which can give up to four PCIe

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4x devices direct access to the CPU for

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high bandwidth low latency performance

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cool the issue though is that today

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it is not yet officially launched and making matters worse Intel is rumored to

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be planning to enable the feature with a hardware key that will only be available

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through bundles with x299 motherboards or ssds thankfully though AMD decided to

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ride in on a white steed and save the day by announcing a free

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driver update and sadly yes their

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marketing materials specifically emphasize the free part that's the world

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we live in now which would enable bootable NVMe raid on

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the x 399 threadripper platform

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so a quick swap to the ASUS zenith extreme and we are ready to

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cry on the desk because AMD pulled the software almost

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immediately after the announcement due to compatibility issues

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once it was finally re-released we then had to bungle our way through the

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incredibly poorly documented process of a loading the AMD NVMe controller driver

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which allows b the AMD raid controller

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driver to be installed which allows c the AMD raid configurator driver to be

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installed then even when we were in Windows running on

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four ssds we hit another roadblock

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our iometer benchmark results were nowhere near what AMD posted on their

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blog so after still more research

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mad props to gary from ASUS by the way man

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we figured out that because a threadripper CPU is technically two

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separate dies linked by AMD's infinity

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fabric interconnect considerations must be made to ensure

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that the NVMe load is balanced between the dies

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otherwise this 11 Gigabyte per second

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link as fast as it is could actually become a bottleneck

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so armed with a detailed diagram of PCIe

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lane allocations and a pre-release BIOS we pushed onward meanwhile though we

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actually hadn't given up entirely on v-rock

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now while i wouldn't recommend getting your Intel drivers from russian download

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mirrors we did find one that claimed to enable

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v-rock without a raid key and actually

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it technically worked but our performance numbers were way off

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compared to the guys at pc perspective who also got v-rock working via what we

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think was a similar method and anyway

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neither of us could get it to boot with non-Intel ssds

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so back to AMD threadripper then which for better or for worse has bootable raid

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today AMD got back to us with a preset for

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iometer and some guidance to help us replicate their results

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not while actually booted from it mind you but with a raw as an unformatted

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file system and we implemented everything meaning that it is finally

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time to do this so after physically balancing the four

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samsung 960 pros between the dies using

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ASUS's dim.2 for two of them and their

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hyper m.2 x 16 card for the other two we

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booted in pure UEFI mode and configured our array using the built-in raid expert

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2 utility we then f6 all three drivers in order

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and saw our 2 terabyte array as available for os installation

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once booted into Windows we launched diameter with one megabyte reads and

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writes at 32q depth and had to rub our

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eyes at the results 12 gigabytes per second on reads and 7.3 gigabytes per

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second on rights and that is without AMD's bs raw file system stuff we are

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talking a fully operational ntfs

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formatted bootable array with those

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kinds of numbers for comparison a single 960 pro

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delivered three and a half gigabytes per second on reads and two gigabytes per

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second on writes in the same machine now

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crystaldiskmark didn't scale quite as well on reads but

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we do have to keep in mind that this technology is still in its infancy at

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least on the driver's side and we might actually see more of the raw hardware's

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potential unlocked in the future so thanks to samsung for sponsoring this

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exploration of high-end bootable raid on the desktop i don't think this crazy

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ride is quite over yet but we're gonna take a little breather and then maybe

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we'll revisit it once things have settled down particularly on the Intel

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side over the next few months so thanks

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you guys for watching if you disliked this video you can hit that button but if you liked it hit like get subscribed

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