Search the Community

Summary Earlier this month, Intel sent out an announcement that they were sunsetting VROC, their on-cpu RAID technology. Less than two weeks later, Intel has now stated that that announcement was made prematurely and they were merely evaluating the possibility. Quotes My thoughts Is this the new corporate trend where companies announce something that people hate then unannounce it a few weeks later? I'm sure they'll go through with it regardless of customer pushback once it becomes a part of Intel On Demand. Sources https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-kills-off-vroc-products-for-xeons-consumer-chips

I've been debating if I am going to be upgrading to the x299 platform or not. One of the killer features that previously won me over is the prospect of running 6 NVMe drives in RAID 0 off CPU lanes. Currently I am running 3 32Gb Optane modules for my OS/Primary drive, and despite it being even more responsive than my previous 500Gb Evo x2 RAID 0 configuration I want moar! Faster YES! Current speed MEH! Since the announcement of x299 and Skylake-X at Computex earlier this year, I've been faithfully checking the usual sites (asus, newegg, amazon, and Google searches) everyday to see if it is available yet. To my dismay I've yet to find one for sale. Does anybody know if Asus actually plans on offering one for sale? I would love purchase a Rampage VI Apex to make my storage dreams come true. Is this just going to be another case of vaporware? It doesn't seem like this would be a product that Asus would have trouble manufacturing.

This news is a few days old, however I've not seen it posted here yet and it's kinda worth while to talk about. The article comes from PC World and brings both good and bad news (https://www.pcworld.com/article/3234669/storage/intel-says-vroc-raid-isnt-dead-its-just-trapped-in-a-hardware-bundle.html). Let's start off with the bad: Intel will no longer be selling those VROC keys to consumers. If you want one, you need to buy it bundled with Intel SSDs or X299 motherboards. This is pretty shitty on Intel's part on a feature they've already managed to fuck up way more than I expected. This is especially true if any of you purchased your X299 PCs with the intent of making use of this feature, and already purchased 3rd party SSDs (Samsung 960 Pros being a likely choice for many, as Intel isn't really top quality in the SSD space yet, though it's possible the brand new optane SSDs change this). Hopefully board manufacturers won't make it too costly to obtain one of these, but depending on the board/system manufacturer you selected, you might not even be able to get one now. Also, I think it goes without saying that if you wanted to set up RAID directly off the CPU's PCIe lanes, and you don't require X299 specifically, AMD is your best bet as you won't need an add-in hardware key AND you won't be limited to a small subset of approved NVME SSDs. Fortunately, there was one nugget of good news So yeah, if you end up choosing Intel and obtaining a VROC key, at least you don't need to pay more to set up more secure RAID configurations. For now....

Intel (with ASUS) showed in Computex their solution for M.2 RAID solution which is also bootable without requiring additional SATA drives. The problem? it's a half-baked solution and Intel could do so much more without this lock-in solution. I wrote a post about it, you could read it here: <LINK REMOVED> (I have asked this forum's admin for permission to post this link).

I know that on Skylake-X, VROC doesn't support RAID 5 without a special key. Is that true of a non-bootable RAID configurations, or is it just VROC bootable partitions?

Am I the only asshole that thought the buying 3 M.2 drives that would work in VROC raid on the whomping $650 motherboard and $1000 CPU and expect the fastest speed RAID to set up just can't happen? Asus tech SUCKS MASSIVE SALTY I DON'T KNOW BALLZ. The best I got was I could use 2 drives in PCIE in RAID but I can't use 1 drive in VROC? because that 1 drive is need for the hyper 16x card and neither the motherboard or the card come with the VROC ket need for this. I get limit PCIE lanes but at this point I can't install windows on even PCIE and only sata. Really? Fuck can anyone explain to me how to set up the 3 "ONBOARD" NO ADD ON CARD in the fastest config? FYI now asus thread has added anything more than I got lucky. I have 7900-x and 3 samsung 960 evos WTF WTF WTF WTF!

Ok I know intel limits their cpus pcie lanes because money money monay! But I want to use the 3 m.2 drive I have in CPU VROC for the fastest speed. Is this possible? I may think about getting 1 more drive to put in slot 4 and do a quad raid set up but is it impossible? I will not use the U.2 port as I have esata and a FTP server with 10g link. I talk with Asus "tech" support but they are kinda useless with any new product, Do I have to have a boot drive and raid separate?

Hello, I would like to ask if it is possible to use 4 Samsung 970 Evo's in raid 0 as a boot drive. I saw Linus made a video about it, but I really don't understand the requirements. I'm currently running a i7 6950x on a Asus rampage V extreme mobo, and would use a "Asus Hyper M.2 Card" to connect all 4 drives. Would this be possible? / What would I need to make this possible? In the video they mentioned Intel vroc, but as far as I understand that is only aviable with newer CPUs.

I did some testing on Optane and VROC using both BIOS and OS before and after Meltdown and Specter patching. The top pic has the OS and BIOS set to a time before the first patches were released, the bottom has both the current BIOS and OS (1803 + kb4284835 + kb4100347). The left is the 905P and the right is 4 900P drives in VROC 0.

Hey guys, my first post here and I hoped that you would be willing to help me assebmle this beauty I am building I have been following builds for quite a long time but this is the first time I would love to assemble this myself - and would love to make it right! Computer is aimed for 3D Rendering - and high speeds of everything. So here it is so far: Intel 7980XE /Highest possible OC/ Alphacool Eisbaer 280 Asus Rampage VI Apex G.Skill 64GB 3200MHz (4x16GB, F4-3200C14Q-64GTZ) /Highest possible OC/ 4x Intel 760p NVME SSD 1TB RAID0 in VROC NVIDIA GTX 1080Ti 11GB Corsair HX1000i NZXT S340 Elite /with removed cable shroud bar to fit EATX/ So I would love to ask and verify if this build is going to work all together. I checked and verified what I could - but would love to double check. Is 4TB VROC going to work? Is each M.2 NVME going to have 4 PCIE lines? So overall performance is going to be over 10GB/s? Is case going to work okay with all parts? Any suggestion welcome. Thanks! :)) UPDATE1: By reading Rampage VI Apex information - I guess its not possible to get 4 NVMEs to RAID0. Also there is only 4 PCIe lines for each DIMM.2 - right? I may need to buy Asus Hyper M.2 Expansion card. So then - I may buy less expensive Asus X299 Card - but there are these VRM problems - what is the current state of VRM temperatures? Is it fixed in lower Asus Mobos? Liquid cooling with EK block is too expensive.

First, let me start by apologizing for my ignorance in this area. Hopefully this post makes sense and I'm not just being dumb about my setup or testing... but I won't be surprised if I am. ;-) Also, this is my first post so apologies in advance if I'm not following any applicable posting etiquette. I've been doing some casual testing with a pair of Samsung 960 Pro NVMe SSDs installed in an Asus Hyper m.2 x16 Card because I'm trying to put together a colume for working on high-resolution photos and video editing the the best performance possible. (With redundant backups to mitigate RAID 0 failure potential, of course.) My setup is fairly similar to the video LTT posted recently about the same topic, though the motherboard is an EVGA X299 FTW-K instead of the Asus (with the most recent BIOS update allowing PCIe bifurcation) and the CPU is an Intel i9-7900X. My results were... interesting. VROC appears to generally perform worse than when I set up the RAID in Windows Disk Management. I don't care about booting from my raid; I have a third 960 Pro for that. But if RAID performance suffers, I'd prefer to avoid that. So my question is this: if booting from the RAID isn't necessary and I'm only concerned with read/write speed (especially read), should I even bother with VROC? As some background to this, it looks like using the Intel RST Enterprise to set up the RAID 0 for VROC-based RAID doesn't actually perform as well for sequential reads on a RAID set up Disk Management by a significant margin: Intel RST-formatted RAID 0 shows reads at 74% the speed when compared to a RAID set up in Windows Disk Management. Sequential writes are nearly identical. VROC is slightly better (just under 111% faster) in 4K tests and IOPS than when the RAID is formatted in Disk Management. Again, if I'm understanding these benchmarks, which I may well not be. I'm I reading these numbers correctly? Am I better off just using Disk Management to format a RAID 0 than Intel RST? Or does VROC just suck right now because Intel hasn't finished releasing it? Please forgive my ignorance as I'm fairly new to RAID and VROC -I'm just trying to figure out how best to set up my system, given the current state of RAID options. As an aside, Intel appears to think that the volume is bootable even though I don't have a VROC key installed in the motherboard and I'm not using Intel SSDs. However, the "System Volume" is listed as "No" so perhaps I'm looking at the wrong value. I've seen this reported in a few places, though.