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VROC Bootable Raid with Intel 900p - when will this be supported in the BIOS?

CharlieH
Level 8
VROC Bootable Raid with Intel 900p - when will this be supported in the BIOS? I just tried 4 Intel 900ps on a Hyper M.2 x16 card and when I hit create Raid it just went back to the previous screen. Maybe I am doing something wrong? I did disable CSM first. And my Hyper M.2 x16 card is set to VROC on its slot in the BIOS. I did see the 4 drives. But no luck putting them in RAID so I can boot from them.
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JustinThyme
Level 13
Where did you source M2 900P drives?



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

JustinThyme wrote:
Where did you source M2 900P drives?


The only place I know selling them is NewEgg or companies on Newegg, at one point there was a company selling them on Newegg with no limit I got my last 4 from them those are the ones I am waiting on, I didn't even realize it wasn't Newegg selling them to me I just saw no limit and clicked away. I got my other 4 from Newegg directly 2 pre-order and I had a watch when they sold out, the watch popped I ordered 2 more and then my pre-order kicked in. Newegg FedExed the 4 overnight no charge but I live right by their distribution center in Indy. I just tested using VROC, 1 as boot drive and the other 3 set in RAID 0 through IRSTe software VMD setup on a single Hyper M.2 x16 card in slot 0. No other drives in my rig right now. I unplugged the fan on the card and the cover is off might take some work to make this look nice I can post a pic if you want my build is spread out all over a table not in my case yet. I have a second Hyper Card in Slot 2 but its empty for now. They are super fast I don't want to quote synthetic benches but I tried 4 as the queue count with my tests and they stomped my PCH RAID 0 2x Samsung Pro 960s in my old rig. A single drive stomped them except in one test. My new rig is clocked at a modest 4.0Ghz, 1.2v across all 18 cores, I haven't spent anytime OCing yet but wanted to at least step up the CPU because we all know VROC loves fast CPUs and Memory. I left my 128GB 3600 MHz memory at 2666 MHz for now but definitely bumping that up after I push the CPU harder. The M.2 connector Intel built is beautiful too the wires are hardwired right to the M.2 connector so there is no huge package on the M.2 connector like other Vendors have. And when I researched buying the M.2 adapter and cable for 8 drives is was close to $400 which would be ~$65 a drive we don't have to pay for. Thank you Intel! I just wanna test real world now my day to day running Hyper-V VMs.

Messy area but the whole thing:
68662

The drives:
68663

The M.2 connectors on the Hyper M.2 x16 card:
68664

Not sure why these came out sideways my first time posting pics out here?

Ugh, enabled Hyper-V and on the reboot the spinning circle sits. Might have to start over, I installed Win Pro 1709 and the chipset and 10G Network installs both failed anyway. The chipset just popped up msgbox install failed instantly and the 10G driver install just hung about 1/6 the way in. This was at stock/auto before I OCed the CPU. The Hyper-V was after though I should have done that first. If Hyper-V doesn't work on with the current BIOS that is going to be a big problem for me. Any way I am going to go back to 1703 and try it then upgrade if it works.

CharlieH wrote:
The only place I know selling them is NewEgg or companies on Newegg, at one point there was a company selling them on Newegg with no limit I got my last 4 from them those are the ones I am waiting on, I didn't even realize it wasn't Newegg selling them to me I just saw no limit and clicked away. I got my other 4 from Newegg directly 2 pre-order and I had a watch when they sold out, the watch popped I ordered 2 more and then my pre-order kicked in. Newegg FedExed the 4 overnight no charge but I live right by their distribution center in Indy. I just tested using VROC, 1 as boot drive and the other 3 set in RAID 0 through IRSTe software VMD setup on a single Hyper M.2 x16 card in slot 0. No other drives in my rig right now. I unplugged the fan on the card and the cover is off might take some work to make this look nice I can post a pic if you want my build is spread out all over a table not in my case yet. I have a second Hyper Card in Slot 2 but its empty for now. They are super fast I don't want to quote synthetic benches but I tried 4 as the queue count with my tests and they stomped my PCH RAID 0 2x Samsung Pro 960s in my old rig. A single drive stomped them except in one test. My new rig is clocked at a modest 4.0Ghz, 1.2v across all 18 cores, I haven't spent anytime OCing yet but wanted to at least step up the CPU because we all know VROC loves fast CPUs and Memory. I left my 128GB 3600 MHz memory at 2666 MHz for now but definitely bumping that up after I push the CPU harder. The M.2 connector Intel built is beautiful too the wires are hardwired right to the M.2 connector so there is no huge package on the M.2 connector like other Vendors have. And when I researched buying the M.2 adapter and cable for 8 drives is was close to $400 which would be ~$65 a drive we don't have to pay for. Thank you Intel! I just wanna test real world now my day to day running Hyper-V VMs.


OK Thats what I thought. You dont have M2 900P drives, you have U2 with a funky conversion device going on as M2 900p drives dont exist.

Screen shots of the benchmarks or it didnt happen. Every other source is showing different results with the 900P only stomping anything in the 4K random read.



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

I said from the get go I was using the adapters very clearly and even thanked Intel for them if you read closer.

BTW a very interesting thing happened when I went to reinstall 1703. I had to load the driver twice to get the drives to show up but on the second load it showed all the drive partitions. I then deleted them and I could install the OS on the 3 drive RAID 0. That was awesome. But I decided not to for now and stuck with the single drive.

I'll try to get some numbers posted soon but like was mentioned in other videos they are synthetic and not real world so they don't matter much to me.

CharlieH wrote:
I said from the get go I was using the adapters very clearly and even thanked Intel for them if you read closer.

BTW a very interesting thing happened when I went to reinstall 1703. I had to load the driver twice to get the drives to show up but on the second load it showed all the drive partitions. I then deleted them and I could install the OS on the 3 drive RAID 0. That was awesome. But I decided not to for now and stuck with the single drive.

I'll try to get some numbers posted soon but like was mentioned in other videos they are synthetic and not real world so they don't matter much to me.


I did read close, you made your statement after the fact which is why I asked about 900P M2 drives because to my knowledge no such critter existed.

The bench marks look good. now did you get a Vroc key with that or is your array going to expire in 90 days?

Yes the synthetic benchmarks are not real world performance but the only means to compare. A bad synthetic benchmark will result in bad performance and vice versa even though the numbers will be skewed from actual real world performance.



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

No VROC key needed, no issue with the software being in trial mode.

The only issue is the BIOS will not Create a RAID 0 on these drives. But you can do that with the IRSTe software and then the BIOS recognizes it as a RAID 0 drive and you can re-install Windows to it. When I get my other 4 I am going to try this with all 8, by adding a Samsung 960 Pro to the PCH, install windows to it, then spin up a VROC RAID 0 8 drive array. Then re-install windows to the RAID 0 and see how that works. I did read somewhere it will only boot off 4 drives on a single VMD controller and there are 3 VMD controllers in the CPU. If so then it will depend on how it scales how many i'll keep in the RAID 0 array and if I'll boot from just 1 lets say.

Another interesting thing to note my Windows boot and shutdown process seem to take significantly longer using VROC (Not sure if it is just using VROC or VROC with the Intel 900ps because I haven't tried the 600ps). But once it is up things seem to be normal well above normal by far :).