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Nvme raid cards?

zara512
By zara512
in Storage Devices
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Hey, I've been looking for a raid card that would support 950 pros, so I could boot on x99. Does anyone know if a raid card exists accepting nvme drives in the m.2 from factor?

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You just RAID them over the PCH. There are no RAID cards that support PCIe drives to my knowledge. RAID cards are for huge arrays of drives using SATA or Serial-Attached SCSI in weird parity configurations.

DON'T DO IT. They're damned fast enough as it is, don'tcha think?

 

Besides, RAID is kinda obsolete as a whole for data integrity purposes.

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Hey, I've been looking for a raid card that would support 950 pros, so I could boot on x99. Does anyone know if a raid card exists accepting nvme drives in the m.2 from factor?

You know that you are approaching enterprise SAN speeds? Why do you need to RAID nvme? It's fast enough as it is. There are no known RAID cards to me that do RAID over PCIe.

See my blog for amusing encounters from IT workplace: http://linustechtips.com/main/blog/585-life-of-a-techie/

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Besides, RAID is kinda obsolete as a whole for data integrity purposes.

 

Not meaning to but in here but what do you mean by that?

 

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But yeah No point in RAIDing thoose SSD's they are stupidly quick as they are.

Intel I9-9900k (5Ghz) | Asus ROG Maximus XI Formula | Corsair Vengeance 16GB DDR4-4133mhz | ASUS ROG Strix 2080Ti | EVGA Supernova G2 1050w 80+Gold | Samsung 950 Pro M.2 (512GB) + (1TB) | Full EK custom water loop |IN-WIN S-Frame (No. 263/500)

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They're not bootable on x99. I'd need a z170, but won't have enough PCIe lanes then. I'll probably have to wait for Skylake E for a board that supports an enthusiast config. I don't think fast enough exists for enthusiasts.

I'll probably be happy with 1,but if there's a way to raid them I wouldn't mind. I'm already running hourly backups.

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Not meaning to but in here but what do you mean by that?

RAID as a protocol is an extremely old and outdated standard. It has relatively few error correction capabilities and it trusts the drives in the array to report errors and bad behaviour, which is not reliable at all - hard drives lie all the time about their SMART status. These days if you want good redundancy that won't suffer from bit-rot, you want to use a ZFS filesystem, which implicitly distrusts the drives it's given, and uses a combination of hardware RAID, software RAID and lots and lots of ECC memory to maintain data integrity, rather than just letting the drives do their own thing.

 

Wendell from Tek Syndicate has some videos on this subject that explain them in much greater detail than I ever could.

 

Back on topic - RAID is not recommended for storage servers anymore, and certainly not for uber-fast storage and OS drives. For basic redundancy, it's fine. RAID1 is good for mirroring, but doesn't substitute for backups. RAID 0... yeah, it's blisteringly fast, but if one drive goes, pfffft - you lose everything.

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You know that you are approaching enterprise SAN speeds? Why do you need to RAID nvme? It's fast enough as it is. There are no known RAID cards to me that do RAID over PCIe.

The big reason I'm thinking about raiding them is in certain use cases the Intel 750 is faster. I think with 950s in raid the 950 beats the 750 in all use cases. I don't know if it would help speed up kernel compilation speed as well.

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RAID 0... yeah, it's blisteringly fast, but if one drive goes, pfffft - you lose everything.

That's why you have rsync running or a backup zfs server running.

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RAID obsolete?

 

Pls. No way. You could argue that "my data is in the cloud, there is no raid there". Yea, the cloud is stored on a SAN, in San Jose, on a RAID 6 array. :D

You're right. It's stored on a SAN, in San Jose, on a RAIDZ6 array, using a ZFS or BTRFS filesystem. Not the ancient, derelict RAID. Bad things happen when you use RAID arrays with lots and lots of drives. You need parity and you need the computers to keep an eye on the drives they have charge over. It's what they're there for. It just means that you need tons of ECC memory.

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Sorry I already knew that I was just wondering what you had to say haha... I agree with your post 100%. 

Intel I9-9900k (5Ghz) | Asus ROG Maximus XI Formula | Corsair Vengeance 16GB DDR4-4133mhz | ASUS ROG Strix 2080Ti | EVGA Supernova G2 1050w 80+Gold | Samsung 950 Pro M.2 (512GB) + (1TB) | Full EK custom water loop |IN-WIN S-Frame (No. 263/500)

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You're right. It's stored on a SAN, in San Jose, on a RAIDZ6 array, using a ZFS or BTRFS filesystem. Not the ancient, derelict RAID. Bad things happen when you use RAID arrays with lots and lots of drives. You need parity and you need the computers to keep an eye on the drives they have charge over. It's what they're there for. It just means that you need tons of ECC memory.

 

Sigh another RAID doom and gloom topic. I'll quote myself from a similar topic thread.

 

 

RAID has been around since the early 90's and is still widely used in data centers. It has served disk arrays in the hundreds of disks with massive data sizes just fine. The majority of enterprise disk arrays still use RAID 6 or equivalent to pool the disks together.

 

Better technologies have come about since then specifically addressing long term storage for file sharing where you don't do side by side replacements every 3-5 years but maintain the original system basically indefinitely. This is why self correcting file systems are so important, there is nothing inherently wrong with RAID, it was just designed with a different purpose in mind.

 

Sure there are a number of SAN manufactures that are moving their product lines to use ZFS (other types too) as the underlying system, especially the ones designed for file storage. In the storage industry there are many more requirements than just doing simple file storage. Be careful not to focus on one technology area.

 

I do agree that RAID needs looking at and needs improvements but ZFS etc doesn't replace everything that RAID can cater for.

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Hey, I've been looking for a raid card that would support 950 pros, so I could boot on x99. Does anyone know if a raid card exists accepting nvme drives in the m.2 from factor?

 

Currently you can raid NVMe disks using Intel onboard RAID. Link here http://www.pcper.com/reviews/Storage/Intel-Skylake-Z170-Rapid-Storage-Technology-Tested-PCIe-and-SATA-RAID/PCIe-RAID-Resu

 

If you are lucky a bios update will come out for X99 giving support for this, don't count on it though.

 

I had a meeting earlier this year with a HP sales engineer regarding upcoming server and storage product lines and updates to existing ones and his impression about NVMe and RAID was that it would be implemented in UEFI, which is what the link above is doing (I think). Currently I haven't heard anything from the likes of LSI regarding hardware RAID cards and NVMe.

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