AMD Threadripper won't come with native support for NVMe-Hardware-RAID at launch

[mynameisjuan]

5 minutes ago, The Benjamins said:

It is fine that AMD does not have the tech.

 

The fuck intel is for putting things behind paywalls, IF intel made it free and AMD didn't have it we would be "mad" at AMD that they do not have these hot new feature.

I cant argue the BS prices for the raid keys but for free it natively supports raid 0 which is still one up from what AMD has and x299 support NVME raid. 

[Kukielka]

3 hours ago, leadeater said:

At work sure, something we already do. I'd do it at home but I don't really need to, already run a 6 SSD array (for capacity).

There still in no use-case for having a bootable nvme raid.

It kinda seems like wasting money on a new level.

[Jito463]

6 hours ago, Curufinwe_wins said:

I'd rather motherboard makers stopped puting 1Gb nics on enthusiast mobos and exclusively swapped to 10gb+ if we really want to talk about unrestricted access and something with an actual function...

ASRock has at least one X399 board with 10GbE onboard.

5 hours ago, leadeater said:

I've got 6 450GB VRaptors without the the plexiglass tho , noisy little things.

I've still got a 32GB VRaptor.  Last time I spun that up, it had a really high-pitched whine to it.  Very annoying over long periods.

4 hours ago, PCGuy_5960 said:

Just FYI, you don't need a raid key for NVMe RAID on X299. You need the key only if you need to use CPU lanes, you can use chipset lanes for free

I thought only RAID 0 worked without the key?  As I understood it, RAIDs 1 and 5/10 required keys, and wouldn't work without them.

3 hours ago, KuJoe said:

RAID0 NVMes for an OS drive? If boot times are so important for you then why are you powering your PC off to begin with?

There's a reason I never power my system down.  PC24/7/365MR for life!  

[Misanthrope]

Honest question: Do we have hardware raid controllers that support nvme already? If so how much are they? 

[Orblivion]

4 hours ago, mynameisjuan said:

Intel needs key ONLY for native CPU lane raid while the chip can do it for free: "Fuck you intel, this is bullshit you greedy bastards"

 

AMD doesnt support even NVME raid nor is able to utilize CPU lanes for raid: "Thats fine, no one uses NVME drives in raid anyway"

 

Like this shit is starting to piss me off. People are treating AMD and everything they do like its the returning of Christ and nothing they do is wrong.

The alternative in this situation though is to delay the launch of the entire platform for the sake of bootable NVME RAID.  What they're doing is most definitely the lesser of two evils.

[manikyath]

9 hours ago, leadeater said:

Technically it's called OneView now but nobody calls it that still and there's also a OneView server VM appliance that you can centrally manage all HPE servers, really cool. I can push out firmware updates to all our servers from one web interface 

wait.. its oneview? then why did our G9's come with iLO licenses?

[Skanky Sylveon]

7 hours ago, mynameisjuan said:

Intel needs key ONLY for native CPU lane raid while the chip can do it for free: "Fuck you intel, this is bullshit you greedy bastards"

 

AMD doesnt support even NVME raid nor is able to utilize CPU lanes for raid: "Thats fine, no one uses NVME drives in raid anyway"

 

Like this shit is starting to piss me off. People are treating AMD and everything they do like its the returning of Christ and nothing they do is wrong.

Intel's 8 and 10 core Skylake x CPUs, are significantly cheaper than their previous 8 and 10 core CPUs.

Also Intel is releasing Coffee Lake (which will bring 6 cores to the mainstream) earlier than initially stated.

 

Before AMD got competitive Intel was getting complacent, the improvements from Skylake to Kabylake was almost non existent.

It took AMD taking back some market share for Intel to finally get off their lazy ass, and start making significant improvements again.

 

Intel, in its current state, is not a company that will work as hard as it can, to make the best products possible.  

Not without competition, and a lot of Intel's customers probably feel like they have been milked right now.

 

The backlash is probably by people that are sick of Intel's milking, more than anything else.

 

Also, please keep in mind that a feature coming later for free vs a feature that you have to pay to unlock, is not comparable.

One you have to pay for, while the other you just have to simply wait.

[leadeater]

1 hour ago, manikyath said:

wait.. its oneview? then why did our G9's come with iLO licenses?

I'll have to check the iLO page itself when I get to work but I thought it says oneview now, thought it's now oneview with iLO advanced feature license or something.

[Belgarathian]

13 hours ago, Nicnac said:

-snip-

 

This seems to be a major disadvantage for x399 systems 

 

What're you trying to do, boot your system in 3.7 seconds instead of 3.9 seconds? Remember that this is only a problem for bootable NVMe arrays, so you can still have a RAID 0 storage array and have the OS on a 3rd NVMe device. 

[TheCherryKing]

Does Eypc support NVMe RAID?

[For Science!]

Can somebody clarify If I understood this properly and so as long as it is not a bootable drive, RAIDing NVMe drives is still going to be supported on launch?

[Skanky Sylveon]

13 minutes ago, For Science! said:

Can somebody clarify If I understood this properly and so as long as it is not a bootable drive, RAIDing NVMe drives is still going to be supported on launch?

You might have to settle with software RAID at launch.

[TheCherryKing]

5 hours ago, Misanthrope said:

Honest question: Do we have hardware raid controllers that support nvme already? If so how much are they? 

Yes, there are some NVMe RAID controllers from LSI that support NVMe devices, SAS devices, and SATA devices. They are quite expensive.

https://www.broadcom.com/products/storage/raid-controllers/

[Misanthrope]

10 minutes ago, TheCherryKing said:

Yes, there are some NVMe RAID controllers from LSI that support NVMe devices, SAS devices, and SATA devices. They are quite expensive.

https://www.broadcom.com/products/storage/raid-controllers/

Thanks for the link

 

Now I'm not sure what would be the use case for a workstation (as opposed to a server) to need extremely high speed raid configurations without as much capacity but if that's needed I guess you can get that and probably platform agnostic.

[leadeater]

1 hour ago, manikyath said:

wait.. its oneview? then why did our G9's come with iLO licenses?

Sorry yea my bad, getting confused since I don't use iLO directly anymore.

[ionbasa]

It wouldn't be real raid anyway. The vast majority of 'raid' found on consumer to pro-sumer MB is 'fake raid' where raid is more or less handled through a driver and multichannel lane configurations in the Bios/Uefi. 

[TechyInAZ]

NVME SSD's alone are so fast, why RAID them?? I just switched from an 840 Pro to a 960 EVO actually and i'm having a hard time noticing any difference in boot times and speed ups during daily use. Only in transfer speeds does the 960 shine.

[Lays]

21 hours ago, manikyath said:

the question is why would an enthousiast need it, other than to just literally throw money out the window?

The enthusiast platform isn't a place where questions like "why would they do that" come to mind.

[ravenshrike]

I don't get why would you run NVME RAID anyway outside of SFF PCs. It's a pain in the ass to replace a drive when it fails which apart from RAID 0 is the entire point. Whereas RAID 0 for your boot drive is just silly since the performance gains at that point are marginal at best and you increase the risk of failure.

[kaiju_wars]

9 hours ago, Cinnabar Sonar said:

Also Intel is releasing Coffee Lake (which will bring 6 cores to the mainstream) earlier than initially stated.

Um... AMD already did that with the Ryzen 5 1600 and 1600X.

Technically they did that way back when with Phenom II X6s.

 

So I don't know why you're saying Intel will be bringing 6 cores to the mainstream, as if they're the first ones doing it.

[Marinatall_Ironside]

21 hours ago, manikyath said:

bleh. i've yet to find a reason to have bootable nvme raid..

Yep, as to me (and to the majority of enthusiasts on here), bootable NVMe RAID is just silly. NVMe RAID only makes sense if you're working on massive projects in a corporate environment.

 

The OS already boots fast enough on an NVMe device, provided you don't have junk already installed in the first place.

[TheCherryKing]

29 minutes ago, ionbasa said:

It wouldn't be real raid anyway. The vast majority of 'raid' found on consumer to pro-sumer MB is 'fake raid' where raid is more or less handled through a driver and multichannel lane configurations in the Bios/Uefi. 

The only way you can get a motherboard with a true RAID controller is by buying a server or workstation board with on-board Broadcom RAID. 

[done12many2]

17 hours ago, The Benjamins said:

but that is only useful in RAID 1 if someone wanted a RAID 0 it would become bottle necked by the chipset, which defeats the purpose of it.

17 hours ago, The Benjamins said:

Well the chipset is on a DMI 3 link which is basicly PCIe3 x4 which is 3940 MB/s, a 960 Pro has a Sequential Read/Write Speed of 3500/2100 MBps. Both of those metrics doubled in a 2 drive RAID 0 would exceed the DMI3 bandwidth. and keep in mind the DMI is used by other stuff at the same time.

 

So a NVME raid over the chipset seems to have a high chance of bottle necking.

17 hours ago, The Benjamins said:

It is fine that AMD does not have the tech.

 

The fuck intel is for putting things behind paywalls, IF intel made it free and AMD didn't have it we would be "mad" at AMD that they do not have these hot new feature.

 

I'm not quite sure that you fully understand how CPU based RAID (VROC) or chipset RAID work on x299.

 

You've reference that Intel is "putting things behind paywalls", but you already know that chipset RAID is included for free.  CPU based RAID (VROC) is the part that's not free.  Of course VROC will bypass the DMI 3.0 bandwidth limitation and allow for full speeds on each NVMe device.  

 

My question is, are you assuming that AMD's RAID will somehow function through the CPU and not the chipset?  This would imply that there's already a controller built into the TR chips as they are on Skylake-X.  If there isn't a physical RAID controller on the TR CPU, it would be impossible for them to add it at a later date.  With that said, it's more likely that the RAID feature that AMD is making available in the future is actually through the chipset, and therefore just as worthless as the free bootable chipset RAID on x299 via the chipset.  How would this make AMD's free version any better?   It doesn't.

 

Intel's VROC would be in addition to the chipset RAID that Intel's x299 currently has and AMD's x399 will eventually have.  It's the only solution that will allow a bootable RAID that bypasses the limitations of funneling all of that bandwidth through 4 chipset lanes.  It does suck that you have to pay for it, but once again, Intel's free RAID solution is no worse then AMD's free future RAID solution.  

 

I think too many people to include Linus are harping on Intel's x299 RAID without fully understanding what it is that they are talking about.  

[ravenshrike]

20 minutes ago, done12many2 said:

I think too many people to include Linus are harping on Intel's x299 RAID without fully understanding what it is that they are talking about.  

I understand it, and the moment they heard about Threadripper they should have scrapped the plan, soldered in the full-scale VROC dongles for free, and eaten the costs. It would have given them a major(albeit stupid because NVME RAID) bonus to the X299 platform and therefore a major selling point.

[Skanky Sylveon]

34 minutes ago, kaiju_wars said:

Um... AMD already did that with the Ryzen 5 1600 and 1600X.

Technically they did that way back when with Phenom II X6s.

 

So I don't know why you're saying Intel will be bringing 6 cores to the mainstream, as if they're the first ones doing it.

I don't believe that Intel ever had a 6 core mainstream chip yet.  That's what I meant.

Bad sentence is bad, and I should feel bad, sorry.