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Maximus XI Extreme Dimm.2 RAID 0 with Samsung 970 Pro nvme SSDs

Deltaphi
Level 7
Hello to anyone who reads this.

I would appreciate any help in clarifying whether you can use Samsung SSDs on the DIMM.2 slot for RAID 0 bootable configuration, or does it work only with Intel branded SSDs.

Thanks for any help.

Dimitris
Motherboard: ASUS Maximus XI Extreme, CPU: Intel© Core™ i9-9900K, RAM: Corsair Vengeance RGB Pro 32GB 3200MHz C14 (CMW32GX4M4C3200C14),
GPU: ASUS ROG Strix RTX 3080 Ti Gaming OC, CPU Cooler: Corsair Hydro H115i RGB Platinum, CASE: Corsair Obsidian 650D, PSU: Corsair AX1200i,
SSD: (NVME) Samsung 970 Pro 512GB & 970 Evo Plus 1TB & (SATA) 850 Pro 256GBx2 RAID 0, HDD: WD Gold 10TB & 2TB, Black 2TB, WD My Book 8TB,
Monitor: ASUS ROG Swift PG279Q, UPS: APC Back-UPS XS 1400U
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11 REPLIES 11

btrach144
Level 7
Yes, Samsung SSDs will work. It just uses Intel RST to create and manage the RAID 0. Most NVMe drives should work without trouble. The main goal is to have 100% matching NVMe drives.

btrach144 wrote:
Yes, Samsung SSDs will work. It just uses Intel RST to create and manage the RAID 0. Most NVMe drives should work without trouble. The main goal is to have 100% matching NVMe drives.


Thank you for the prompt reply 😉
Motherboard: ASUS Maximus XI Extreme, CPU: Intel© Core™ i9-9900K, RAM: Corsair Vengeance RGB Pro 32GB 3200MHz C14 (CMW32GX4M4C3200C14),
GPU: ASUS ROG Strix RTX 3080 Ti Gaming OC, CPU Cooler: Corsair Hydro H115i RGB Platinum, CASE: Corsair Obsidian 650D, PSU: Corsair AX1200i,
SSD: (NVME) Samsung 970 Pro 512GB & 970 Evo Plus 1TB & (SATA) 850 Pro 256GBx2 RAID 0, HDD: WD Gold 10TB & 2TB, Black 2TB, WD My Book 8TB,
Monitor: ASUS ROG Swift PG279Q, UPS: APC Back-UPS XS 1400U

JustinThyme
Level 13
Intel SSDs only apply to VROC so you don’t have to worry about that. My question is though why are you going raid0? If it’s for a performance boost you won’t see it on NVME drives as they already saturate the DMI bus as standalone. You will also take a hit on the low que depth speeds due to the latency of raid.*



“Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity, I'm not sure about the former” ~ Albert Einstein

JustinThyme wrote:
Intel SSDs only apply to VROC so you don’t have to worry about that. My question is though why are you going raid0? If it’s for a performance boost you won’t see it on NVME drives as they already saturate the DMI bus as standalone. You will also take a hit on the low que depth speeds due to the latency of raid.*


I was planning to use cpu lanes dropping gpu to X8 as it doesn't affect frames so much. With 980 Ti I was running on X58 board X16 pcie 2.0 which is about the same as X8 pcie 3.0. Do you think it is a bad idea to go this way?
Motherboard: ASUS Maximus XI Extreme, CPU: Intel© Core™ i9-9900K, RAM: Corsair Vengeance RGB Pro 32GB 3200MHz C14 (CMW32GX4M4C3200C14),
GPU: ASUS ROG Strix RTX 3080 Ti Gaming OC, CPU Cooler: Corsair Hydro H115i RGB Platinum, CASE: Corsair Obsidian 650D, PSU: Corsair AX1200i,
SSD: (NVME) Samsung 970 Pro 512GB & 970 Evo Plus 1TB & (SATA) 850 Pro 256GBx2 RAID 0, HDD: WD Gold 10TB & 2TB, Black 2TB, WD My Book 8TB,
Monitor: ASUS ROG Swift PG279Q, UPS: APC Back-UPS XS 1400U

JustinThyme
Level 13
No, you’re OK at X8 on the GPU as the 2080Ti is the first card to saturate PCIE Gen 3.0 X8 bandwidth and only by a little. You won’t be able to do raid 0 with one in the CPU and the other on the PCH though. *Like I said though it’s pointless. If your board allows both on CPU which I don’t think it does you still can’t raid them up and make it bootable. Only way to do that is on X299 and it has to be Intel drives.



“Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity, I'm not sure about the former” ~ Albert Einstein

JustinThyme wrote:
No, you’re OK at X8 on the GPU as the 2080Ti is the first card to saturate PCIE Gen 3.0 X8 bandwidth and only by a little. You won’t be able to do raid 0 with one in the CPU and the other on the PCH though. *Like I said though it’s pointless. If your board allows both on CPU which I don’t think it does you still can’t raid them up and make it bootable. Only way to do that is on X299 and it has to be Intel drives.


That brings this thread to my original question that started it:

Bootable Raid 0 on Dimm.2 using 8 CPU lanes for 2 Samsung 970 Pro NVMe SSDs, dropping GPU slot to X8 is not possible? or is it?

The motherboard User Manual has this on the Dimm.2 section:

78382

Thanks for your help.
Motherboard: ASUS Maximus XI Extreme, CPU: Intel© Core™ i9-9900K, RAM: Corsair Vengeance RGB Pro 32GB 3200MHz C14 (CMW32GX4M4C3200C14),
GPU: ASUS ROG Strix RTX 3080 Ti Gaming OC, CPU Cooler: Corsair Hydro H115i RGB Platinum, CASE: Corsair Obsidian 650D, PSU: Corsair AX1200i,
SSD: (NVME) Samsung 970 Pro 512GB & 970 Evo Plus 1TB & (SATA) 850 Pro 256GBx2 RAID 0, HDD: WD Gold 10TB & 2TB, Black 2TB, WD My Book 8TB,
Monitor: ASUS ROG Swift PG279Q, UPS: APC Back-UPS XS 1400U

JustinThyme
Level 13
Booting from CPU lanes with anything but Intel drives in VROC is not possible. Software raid only with non intel drives. *Trust me when I say all this has been tested and beaten to death. Myself and several others tried every configuration possible. *This board and it’s design are an intel chipset so they control the patent and implementation. At launch they wouldn’t even get off of what VROC keys would work and many were tried. Only one will work but it’s not needed for bootable raid zero. BUT Intel drives are mandatory. You want the speed you have to pony up. Two 480 GB drives are not all that much more than 2 1TB Samsung 970 pro drives. Yes get half as much but that’s just the way it is. The intel drives can’t be touched to random low que depth performance which is the most important of heavy workloads and OS operations. Samsung owns the large file sequential reads. My rig is set up with intel drives for the OS and general software while all games and anything with large files gets installed to a single Samsung 1TB 960 pro in DIMM.2_1 set to CPU as the source. *I’m about to change it all though as after going to 2080 Ti cards they actually do saturate X8 bandwidth so I’m ditching VROC completely and using a single intel U2 drive, changing the DIMM.2_1 to PCH so I get *16 on PCIE16X16_1 and PCIEX16_3.*

Bottom line no matter how you slice it is if you want bootable raid on CPU Lanes it must be intel drives, if you want raid on PCH you can use whatever drives you want. Search VROC X299 section, sit back grab your favorite libation and read a bit. We pounded this hard at product launch Q4 2017.*

The reference to Optane in the last sentence is optane Memory sticks. *Refer to the section in A X299 manual VROC for info about raid on CPU lanes.*

Intel isn’t about to allow the same functions on consumer or prosumer boards that are available to enterprise solutions that makes them 10 times more per machine. *If they did that we wouldn’t be having this conversation as enterprise customers would have already depleted all stock of motherboards if they can do the same at a fraction of the cost.*

By all means feel free to try it. Maybe you can outsmart Intel and share with the rest of us. I’m not optimistic on any such endeavor though.



“Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity, I'm not sure about the former” ~ Albert Einstein

JustinThyme wrote:
Booting from CPU lanes with anything but Intel drives in VROC is not possible. Software raid only with non intel drives. *Trust me when I say all this has been tested and beaten to death. Myself and several others tried every configuration possible. *This board and it’s design are an intel chipset so they control the patent and implementation. At launch they wouldn’t even get off of what VROC keys would work and many were tried. Only one will work but it’s not needed for bootable raid zero. BUT Intel drives are mandatory. You want the speed you have to pony up. Two 480 GB drives are not all that much more than 2 1TB Samsung 970 pro drives. Yes get half as much but that’s just the way it is. The intel drives can’t be touched to random low que depth performance which is the most important of heavy workloads and OS operations. Samsung owns the large file sequential reads. My rig is set up with intel drives for the OS and general software while all games and anything with large files gets installed to a single Samsung 1TB 960 pro in DIMM.2_1 set to CPU as the source. *I’m about to change it all though as after going to 2080 Ti cards they actually do saturate X8 bandwidth so I’m ditching VROC completely and using a single intel U2 drive, changing the DIMM.2_1 to PCH so I get *16 on PCIE16X16_1 and PCIEX16_3.*

Bottom line no matter how you slice it is if you want bootable raid on CPU Lanes it must be intel drives, if you want raid on PCH you can use whatever drives you want. Search VROC X299 section, sit back grab your favorite libation and read a bit. We pounded this hard at product launch Q4 2017.*

The reference to Optane in the last sentence is optane Memory sticks. *Refer to the section in A X299 manual VROC for info about raid on CPU lanes.*

Intel isn’t about to allow the same functions on consumer or prosumer boards that are available to enterprise solutions that makes them 10 times more per machine. *If they did that we wouldn’t be having this conversation as enterprise customers would have already depleted all stock of motherboards if they can do the same at a fraction of the cost.*

By all means feel free to try it. Maybe you can outsmart Intel and share with the rest of us. I’m not optimistic on any such endeavor though.


So I might as well use single Samsung 970 Pros than RAID 0 for Windows OS and Apps+Games separately.

Thanks for all your trouble to provide such detailed information, it was an eye opener.

All the best,

Dimitris
Motherboard: ASUS Maximus XI Extreme, CPU: Intel© Core™ i9-9900K, RAM: Corsair Vengeance RGB Pro 32GB 3200MHz C14 (CMW32GX4M4C3200C14),
GPU: ASUS ROG Strix RTX 3080 Ti Gaming OC, CPU Cooler: Corsair Hydro H115i RGB Platinum, CASE: Corsair Obsidian 650D, PSU: Corsair AX1200i,
SSD: (NVME) Samsung 970 Pro 512GB & 970 Evo Plus 1TB & (SATA) 850 Pro 256GBx2 RAID 0, HDD: WD Gold 10TB & 2TB, Black 2TB, WD My Book 8TB,
Monitor: ASUS ROG Swift PG279Q, UPS: APC Back-UPS XS 1400U

JustinThyme
Level 13
That would be my advice. If I were you would leave a single on CPU lanes for OS and the other on PCH for large app installs.*



“Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity, I'm not sure about the former” ~ Albert Einstein