one of the big stories at computex this year was about removing the bottlenecks
from high-speed m.2 NVMe ssds pretty
much every motherboard was bristling with mounts and partners like ASUS even
showed off this crazy card that could
hold four 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
let's 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 vnan storage is
rated to a blazing fast 3 500 megabytes per second reads and 2100 megabytes per
second writes has a custom five core samsung processor on board 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
five but that turned out to be a figment of my imagination so we settled then on
the ASUS prime x299 deluxe with a
separate pci express card to handle the last m.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 radon CPU or vroc
since the latest skylakex 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
it 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 x299 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 emphasize the free part that's the world
we live in now which would enable bootable NVMe raid on
the x 399 threadripper 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 bungle our way through the
incredibly poorly documented process of a loading the AMD NVMe controller driver
which allows b the AMD raid controller
driver to be installed which allows c the AMD raid configurator 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 a threadripper 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 v-rock
now while i wouldn't recommend getting your Intel drivers from russian download
mirrors we did find one that claimed to enable
v-rock 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 v-rock 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 threadripper 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 four
samsung 960 pros between the dies using
ASUS's dim.2 for two of them and their
hyper m.2 x 16 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 all three drivers in order
and saw our 2 terabyte array as available for os installation
once booted into Windows we launched diameter with one megabyte reads and
writes at 32q depth and had to rub our
eyes at the results 12 gigabytes per second on reads and 7.3 gigabytes per
second on rights and that is without AMD's bs raw file system 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
crystaldiskmark 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's side and we might actually see more of the raw hardware's
potential unlocked in the future so thanks to samsung for sponsoring this
exploration 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 so thanks
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