AMD ThreadRipper NVMe RAID Released
AMD planned to release the assets required to build bootable NVMe RAID volumes on September 25, but the feature was pushed back. A media announcement at the time stated that the company would need to coordinate with motherboard manufacturers to position the assets required to give the feature to users. The assets include code for motherboard manufacturers to pack into custom BIOS, drivers, and special management software.
Now, all of the pieces are available to users. We haven't researched every single motherboard, but a quick look at select products all listed updated BIOS files. The AMD RAIDXper2 RAID Management Utility and NVMe RAID Driver for Windows was also published by AMD in the support section.
Users can manage and monitor their NVMe RAID array within Windows using the AMD RAIDXpert2 management console.Prior to OS initialization, users can also manage their NVMe RAID array within the motherboard BIOS. A BIOS update to include NVMe RAID support is required.It is recommended that users create a new NVMe RAID along with a fresh Windows 10 installation.Users may create an NVMe RAID configuration with the motherboard BIOS.Provide the Standalone NVMe RAID Driver for Windows 10 Installation extracted to USB flash drive.The Windows 10 installer will detect the RAID array, and installation may proceed.
AMD chose to give the feature away as a value-add rather than charge customers, as Intel plans to do with the X299 platform. Even though X299 documentation refers to VROC and dongles needed to fully support the feature, Intel has yet to release the dongles.
Get Tom's Hardware's best news and in-depth reviews, straight to your inbox.
Chris Ramseyer was a senior contributing editor for Tom's Hardware. He tested and reviewed consumer storage.
-
MRFS Chris, I believe it would help your readers a lot by elaborating on the significance of this announcement. For one, TR systems support a much larger number of PCIe lanes than the competition. And, by now the bandwidth limit imposed by Intel's DMI 3.0 link is very well documented. Although it has taken many years for hardware vendors to exploit the raw bandwidth of x16 slots for storage subsystems, the industry is now embracing that vast potential. For example, there is an obvious engineering elegance with 4 NVMe SSDs @ x4 PCIe 3.0 lanes = x16 edge connector. And, allowing modern RAID modes to span multiple add-in cards is another exciting development that clearly multiplies the raw upstream bandwidth. As such, there is now a realistic opportunity to assemble non-volatile solid-state mass storage with the same raw speed as common DDR3 DRAM! Those of us who were promoting this capability just 5 years ago were called dreamers. Just do the numbers: one x16 edge connector has a MAX HEADROOM of 15,753.6 MB/second, and twice that with two x16 edge connectors -- truly exciting!Reply -
msroadkill612 Yes MRFS. It will take folks some time to figure just how useful an even small rocket drive will be to computing, by which time they will have bought their 16 lane intel, and be precluded.Reply