Is Raid 0 worth it for NVMe M.2 SSD?

[SSD Sean]

AFAIK all m.2 slots on Intel mainstream platforms are all chipset attached, rather than direct processor attached. And since the chipset link is ~4x pci-e 3.0 plugging two m.2 raid devices in is going to bottleneck them in raid configuration. You can use adapters with the GPU PCI-e slots to get around this of course.

But then you can’t boot from the RAID array because it is a software RAID only at that point, without a special M.2 RAID card that is.

 

[VirtualLarry]

But then you can’t boot from the RAID array because it is a software RAID only at that point, without a special M.2 RAID card that is.

My experience, at least from viewing BIOS options on quite a few recent boards, not actually trying it, is that any recent mobo with NVMe support (and slots, some even without dedicated slots but with NVMe BIOS support), will support both using and booting off of an NVMe drive, plugged into ANY PCI-E slot wide enough to accommodate it.

 

[SSD Sean]

My experience, at least from viewing BIOS options on quite a few recent boards, not actually trying it, is that any recent mobo with NVMe support (and slots, some even without dedicated slots but with NVMe BIOS support), will support both using and booting off of an NVMe drive, plugged into ANY PCI-E slot wide enough to accommodate it.

That is true. But, once you play with RAID, that changes. Intel Z series chipset motherboards don’t support VROC. This means they can’t implement firmware RAID over the PCIe slots that connect directly to the CPU, only the M.2 slots connected to the PCH. To RAID 0 two M.2 SSDs and (this is the important part) attain PCIe 3.0 x8 performance (remember PCH is only 3.0 x4), you need a special RAID card with RAID chip built in or use software RAID within your OS. Thus, you CAN NOT boot off of the latter.

 

[VirtualLarry]

That is true. But, once you play with RAID, that changes. Intel Z series chipset motherboards don’t support VROC. This means they can’t implement firmware RAID over the PCIe slots that connect directly to the CPU, only the M.2 slots connected to the PCH. To RAID 0 two M.2 SSDs and (this is the important part) attain PCIe 3.0 x8 performance (remember PCH is only 3.0 x4), you need a special RAID card with RAID chip built in or use software RAID within your OS. Thus, you CAN NOT boot off of the latter.

Interesting that Intel's mainstream-socket boards still have that limitation.

AFAIK, AM4 and TR4 boards do not have that limitation.

MY Asus B450F STRIX board, allows me to use two PCI-E NVMe drives, one connected to x4 of the CPU lanes, and one connected to the dedicated x4 NVMe socket that AM4 platforms have, and run them in RAID-0.

 

[SSD Sean]

Yep! Exactly. AMD is shaming intel hardcore with their new chipsets and performance with all these vulnerabilities coming to light.

 

[aigomorla]

Guys intel put a Paywall behind true hardware RAID on Nvme's with a DLC content key called VROC. :X
https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000024550/memory-and-storage.html

I think everything else is done software like on the Z370 chipset vs the X299 chipset, hence like sean states you can not boot off them.

 

[Billy Tallis]

Guys intel put a Paywall behind true hardware RAID on Nvme's with a DLC content key called VROC. :X

VROC isn't hardware RAID.

 

[aigomorla]

VROC isn't hardware RAID.

its raid on the cpu.. so i would put it as hardware.

 

[Billy Tallis]

its raid on the cpu.. so i would put it as hardware.

There's no dedicated hardware for the RAID functionality. It's software RAID, not hardware RAID.

 

[Hail The Brain Slug]

its raid on the cpu.. so i would put it as hardware.

What do you think the V stands for in VROC?

 

[aigomorla]

OK guys..

You need a KEY to unlock the Virtual Raid... but its located on the CPU because NVMe's are PCI-E based hence why its AT the CPU.
That is why i said its hardware.

If it was software there would be software unlocks, but you can't, you require a HARDWARE KEY.

Show me a software unlock for VROC and i'll say its 100% software, because you can not bypass this unless you have the HARDWARE KEY.

 

[Billy Tallis]

OK guys..

You need a KEY to unlock the Virtual Raid... but its located on the CPU because NVMe's are PCI-E based hence why its AT the CPU.
That is why i said its hardware.

If it was software there would be software unlocks, but you can't, you require a HARDWARE KEY.

Show me a software unlock for VROC and i'll say its 100% software, because you can not bypass this unless you have the HARDWARE KEY.

The VROC key doesn't do anything. No user data flows through that device. The only purpose it serves is that the motherboard's firmware checks for the presence of a VROC key before deciding whether to load the RAID driver for UEFI, and the Intel driver for Windows makes similar checks. It's just an old-fashioned copy protection dongle. If VROC was compelling enough, people would be hacking Intel's drivers to disable the check for the VROC key, and the result would be NVMe RAID without a VROC key and with identical performance, because the VROC key does not provide any RAID functionality.

 

[nosirrahx]

You don't need the key if you are doing VROC 0 or 1 with Intel drives, that is natively supported, it is even bootable. I use this in my workstation with 4 900P SSDs.

The VROC key gets you additional RAID levels and I believe expanded support for SSDs but I have seen reports that this isn't true.

In general Intel has done a terrible job giving consistent details about VROC.

As far as hardware VS. software, its slightly closer to hardware than the typical RAID you get on an Intel board. Its really only a boost to 4KQ1T1 type access over conventional RAID due to the reduced latency through direct CPU connected PCIe lanes.

Conventional 4X RAID 0 would not have 4KQ1T1 speed this good:

 

[rsutoratosu]

I play with it but did not use.. i'm using a t7800 ws with the quad nvme pci card.

 

[thor23]

Six of one, half-dozen the other, Bro!

I have Primocache on four -- no, five -- five of six household systems, with a laptop and a 2012 R2 Essentials version of the software I blew ~$100 on. I've never really had any significant problem with it. Certain stress-test programs would ignore the reservation for RAM but just give F*!$y test results or fail in some obviously unanticipated way that didn't make sense. So? Delete the caches when running the stressors!

I've had visions and dreams lately about getting 64GB 4x16GB RAM for less than half the real-world price. When if ever will that happen?

It's a shame DDR2-3 to pcie adapters don't exist for programs like primocache.

 

[thor23]

Also regards Raiding 2 x Nvme drives is even more useless than doing Sata3 Raid 0(Though I did notice a performance benefit with software raid 0 on a games/programs drive seperate from windows install drive).
The best way to give your SSD a performance boost is to combine it with a 32Gb optane module using Primocache.(Don't think the Inter software works with non intel drives)

 

[nosirrahx]

Also regards Raiding 2 x Nvme drives is even more useless than doing Sata3 Raid 0(Though I did notice a performance benefit with software raid 0 on a games/programs drive seperate from windows install drive).
The best way to give your SSD a performance boost is to combine it with a 32Gb optane module using Primocache.(Don't think the Inter software works with non intel drives)

You actually get a lot more benefit from the 800P modules (and soon he M15/815P) modules.

The 58GB 800P combined with a cheap 4GB SATA SSD is cheaper than 2 2TB NVMe drives in RAID 0 as well as significantly faster in many use cases.

I use a 118GB 800P + a 2TB Samsung 860 Pro in my travel laptop and the combination is absolutely blazing (especially the 4KQ1T1):

 

[abufrejoval]

Jason:
I've been running SATA SSD RAID-0 for a number of years with 2 Samsung 500 GB EVO's on a Scratchpad Partition under an Intel Z68/i7 2700K platform - It's FAST but it's a playground for me and all trash is permanently deleted - ;o)

Be aware, Intel does not like Samsung SSD's doing this and you have to hack your Intel MB Bios to invoke TRIM pass through for other then Intel SSD's in RAID-0.

Can't argue your point re: RAID-0 PCIe NVMe maybe more or less pointless at this date and time. Not that I haven't been looking at this perhaps unnecessary and expensive option but with large Core CPU's PCIe 4 may make it worth while.

Hmm, that BIOS hack sounds interesting...

I have a Haswell Xeon E3-1276v3 running a 24x7 home-server on an Asus P9D WS with a C226 chipset (basically a Z77, I think) and 32GB of ECC RAM. Runs a RAID6 of eight 2.5" SATA HDDs with an LSI 9261i8 hardware RAID controller (close to 700MB/s sequential) and I now wanted to add some SSD cache pool to it, since I upgraded it to 10Gbit Ethernet to consolidate that extra storage tier in a single box for the other systems to share.

I wanted more than 2TB (quite pricey as NVMe, too), and I'm out of slots anyway, since it's already bifuricating its 16 lanes between the GPU (very low noise/power GTX 1060 for on-demand remote gaming) and the RAID adapter, while the PCHs 4 lanes are taken up by the Aquantia 10Gbit NIC.

But there are still the orginal 6 SATA ports only one of which was used for the boot SSD 860 Pro, so I got myself 4 1TB 860 Evos into a RAID0 mostly for caching stuff like VMs and Steam games. I chose the 1TB units as they were most economical in terms of price/capacity and I was hoping get a little more than single port SATA bandwidth as a windfall.

The Intel software RAID0 tops out at 1.4GB/s but that would be good match, if data going from the SATA raid to the 10Gbit NIC diddn't have to squeeze through the 4x v2 DMI bottleneck twice. Even if the data channel doesn't pass through the CPU, DMA needs RAM and that's north of the PCH while data on file server mode travels South to South.

Sure would have been better if I could have recycled the 4 lanes the LSI RAID doesn't actually take off the 8 lanes assigned to it: These static allocations are really painful, especially when you know that the CPU would actually support 8+4+4, but 8+8 is more "popular".

Anyhow: I was quite shocked to find out that the intel RAID driver presents the four SSDs as a hard disk so Windows 2016 ain't trimming. Crystal disk info quite cleary identifies them as four SSDs and that's how they are explicitely labelled in the BIOS, too. But where I saw simply a deficit in the software RAID driver (used to be quite normal in SSD early days) with your remark I see a chance Intel is actively hurting the competition: Quite inacceptable perhaps even illegal once you find a court and bring the patience to judge it so.

So where exactly do I need to fiddle to toggle that Intel-only bit?

 

[thor23]

You actually get a lot more benefit from the 800P modules (and soon he M15/815P) modules.

The 58GB 800P combined with a cheap 4GB SATA SSD is cheaper than 2 2TB NVMe drives in RAID 0 as well as significantly faster in many use cases.

I use a 118GB 800P + a 2TB Samsung 860 Pro in my travel laptop and the combination is absolutely blazing (especially the 4KQ1T1):

Of course the bigger modules would be better but even a 16Gb can improve system responsiveness dramatically. If you can tell the difference between running from a ramdisk compared to an ssd then optane even in caching mode feels a little closer to ram speeds than ssd speed, oweing to its insanely fast Q1T1 4k reads.
My 16Gb optane in caching mode(adds around 10% overhead=10%reduction in native speed) is almost 5x faster than my sata3 ssd for Q1T1 4k reads(155Mb/s vs 32Mb/s) - I think that's where all the sense of speed improvement comes from.

 

[nosirrahx]

Of course the bigger modules would be better but even a 16Gb can improve system responsiveness dramatically. If you can tell the difference between running from a ramdisk compared to an ssd then optane even in caching mode feels a little closer to ram speeds than ssd speed, oweing to its insanely fast Q1T1 4k reads.
My 16Gb optane in caching mode(adds around 10% overhead=10%reduction in native speed) is almost 5x faster than my sata3 ssd for Q1T1 4k reads(155Mb/s vs 32Mb/s) - I think that's where all the sense of speed improvement comes from.

It is. Huge sequential speed is great for moving large files around but your OS spends most of its time interacting with a mountain of small files so overall performance feels snappy with higher Q1T14K reads.

 

[FedericoUY]

Had the same question that you are having. In the past used a raid 0 of 60gb ssd with sandforce controllers (sf2281). After some years, ended up with a ssd non working and the entire raid lost. It was only system and games anyway. I currently own a z270 based mobo, and when installing a m2, was wondering if 1 x 512 or 2 x 256 in raid. I chose one drive to not populate both slots, and speed wise you wont see differences, besides with 2 you will overpass the speed limits of the slot.
My drive is a 960 PRO.

 

[tryingtogetssdraidtowork]

Apologies, posted wrongly now made new thread.