Rampage VI Extreme and Samsung 960 Pro in Raid

[Mavtop]

Same here with Samsung 960 PRO 2TB x 2

I've determined that either I raid 0 them for application drives on PCIE. Then fill out the rest of my Hyper x16 card with 2tb pros.

and run Windows either off of the new Optane 900P or a combination Optane 32gb and Samsung PRO 2tb or EVO 4tb on SATA.

This way the responsiveness of the system is preserved either way, no matter how large my application raid 0 array gets.

[rzotti]

I'm not sure you can through conventional means. If you turn your DIMM.2 to PCH, the m.2s should show up in BIOS as non-VROC drives. IRST may let you create the bootable RAID from BIOS, but since you are going through the PCH, you are going to hit your bandwidth very quickly with just one 960Pro. You would double your write, so you'd get something like 3500 read and 3000 ish write.

Agree 100%. What may work however to overcome the bandwidth limitation is to have a raid 0 array with one M2 on the DIMM2 card (on chipset) and another on the slot under the cover. I read about something similar working for the Apex (one M2 on each dimm2 slot) with very acceptable results.

[Brighttail]

Agree 100%. What may work however to overcome the bandwidth limitation is to have a raid 0 array with one M2 on the DIMM2 card (on chipset) and another on the slot under the cover. I read about something similar working for the Apex (one M2 on each dimm2 slot) with very acceptable results.

Ah yes I remember this. It was a very interesting situation. He only had a 28 lane chip so he used one M.2 off the CPU DImm.2 and one off the chipset Dimm.2 and was able to put them into a RAID 0. He didn't get perfect x2 scaling but instead of 7000 Seq read he was getting 5800 and pretty much double writes. I don't remember if he was able to make it bootable.

[Beto556]

Thanks my friends...

The only way to get Raid0 bootable and acceptable is to have the VROC dongle?
Not even buying Asus Hyper Card and puting 2 Samsung960Pro?

[Brighttail]

Thanks my friends...

The only way to get Raid0 bootable and acceptable is to have the VROC dongle?
Not even buying Asus Hyper Card and puting 2 Samsung960Pro?

This is not correct. If you have intel drives you can use VROC without the dongle to get them into RAID 0. The dongle is supposed to be for RAID 1, 5, 10.

[Beto556]

This is not correct. If you have intel drives you can use VROC without the dongle to get them into RAID 0. The dongle is supposed to be for RAID 1, 5, 10.

Hi Bro !! Greetings from Cariocas

Yes....you're 100% correct !

But what happens if I install my 2 Samsung 960Pro on an Asus Hyper Card?
Will I be able to enable RAID0?
I'll be able to make it bootable?

I already regret not having bought an AMD 1950X

The question is: How can I have a bootable RAID0 with 2 Samsungs 960Pro?

Best Regards and nice week

[Brighttail]

Hi Bro !! Greetings from Cariocas

Yes....you're 100% correct !

But what happens if I install my 2 Samsung 960Pro on an Asus Hyper Card?
Will I be able to enable RAID0?
I'll be able to make it bootable?

I already regret not having bought an AMD 1950X

The question is: How can I have a bootable RAID0 with 2 Samsungs 960Pro?

Best Regards and nice week

If you check back into this thread there has been some links to a person who has tried all of this. The Asus hyper is nothing more than a PCI-e card which allows you to put four m.2s and run them off one PCI-e x16 lane. Yes you can put any m.2s on it and yes you can do any in a RAID 0 array, whether it is bootable is a different story.

From what I saw, he was able to load windows on to a disc then download the RST drivers and create a RAID 0 array with both the intel and the Samsung drives. Both SAID they were bootable, but when he went into BIOS, the BIOS didn't recognize the Samsung boot Array so Windows couldn't be installed. He was able to load the drivers on and install Windows, but the problem is the BIOS doesn't have those drivers auto load each time you would start your computer. He made mention that he felt it was still possible but I didn't see a sure fire way to do it. The intel RAID 0 booted up fine and he was able to use VROC with it.

What I found very interesting tho, was on a normal windows installation, he was able to create a non-bootable VROC RAID 0 array using the Samsung m.2s. This to me is what I would want and will test it when I get everything all together. From what I understood VROC doesn't work well if you have two m.2 drives using separate slots, like an m.2 and a DIMM.2 slot. I'm going to have to play with this and see if the DIMM.2 would allow VROC. If it only works with a Hyper type card directly in a PCI-e slot, I might have to get one. We'll see.

[Beto556]

Dear Brighttail,

As usual you are expert! Thank you for your attention and prompt reply. I am waiting for my R6E in order to test.
I hope Intel amend this limitation.
Long life for AMD

[Brighttail]

Dear Brighttail,

As usual you are expert! Thank you for your attention and prompt reply. I am waiting for my R6E in order to test.
I hope Intel amend this limitation.
Long life for AMD

I'm not sure I'm an expert just a lot of trial and error on my own. I still have to put my M.2s onto my board and do some testing on my own still.

[Brighttail]

I've been thinking about this for a few days now and I think I may put my board back on the test bench before I build my system. I have four m.2. 3 of them are the Samsung 960/961 and one 950. The 961 and 960s run just about the exact same in benchmarks, with the 961 being a little faster.

I want to test if I can truly get VROC working on the Samsung drives as shown in the articles linked here. https://www.pcper.com/reviews/Storag...s-Quad-960-PRO

In this article we see that the Hyper x16 not being recognized as a RAID device and a driver needing to be installed. Asus apparently doesn't provide the driver. My point is it looks like VROC will NOT be possible on the DIMM.2 as you can't select that in the BIOS. You can only select VROC to be active on a device in a PCI-e Slot. Furthermore, it seems that in order for VROC to be active, the drives used have to be on ONE card in ONE PCI-e slot. This makes sense on the surface, but I have heard some odd things when it comes to RAID.

For example, a person had two M.2s on the DIMM.2 drive in RAID 0 and was only getting 3.5Ghz sec read. He then created a RAID 0 array using one drive connected to the CPU lanes and one m.2 from the PCH lanes and suddenly was getting 6.0Ghz. I didn't know that creating a RAID 0 array from different CPU/PCH lanes was possible. So I plan to try the following with 2 and 3 m.2 drives:

- Attempt to create a RAID 0 array using just 2 drives on the DIMM.2 (CPU) then (PCH) and see difference in benchmarks.
- Attempt to add a third one using the lower M.2 slot.
- Attempt to add 2 and 3 drives using only cards in PCI-E slots (thus only using CPU lanes) - installing the RAID driver if necessary (if I can find it )

I basically want to see what gives the best benchmarks and to see if it is possible to have the Samsung drives be able to take advantage of VROC without needing the Asus hyper x16. As you can see there are three options for the PCI-e slot. A regular card using VROC. The Hyper x16 using VROC and the Hyper x16 not using VROC for (data). So if you can select a single PCI card using VROC with only one drive, then you SHOULD be able to use VROC over two or more single PCI-e cards. Basically I'm trying to determine if the Hyper x16 is a necessity.

What does seem necessary is the enterprise version of IRST. At least I don't know if he tried the normal version of IRST. So many unknowns and Intel/Asus aren't really being forthcoming about what is/is not possible. There are many conflicting bits of information like whether or not you need a dongle to run RAID 0 in VROC.

Any thoughts on this?