PCIE 4.0 NVME Raid0 on Mini-ITX Motherboard

[MBWH]

Hey everyone, this is my first post, so if I'm doing something wrong here or if this is the wrong section, please do tell me.

 

I'm currently parting out a mini-itx build on the x570 platform, and so far I've found only 1 mini-itx motherboard that actually has 2 PCIE 4.0 NVME slots: The Gigabyte Aorus X570i Pro Wifi.
Note: I do have a Ryzen 7 3700x already, which of course does support PCIE 4.0

The problem is: 1 slot is running off the chipset, and the other off the CPU, so here's my question:
Could I run 2 PCIE 4.0 NVME drives in raid 0 on this motherboard without problems?
If not, is there a mini-itx board that does support that, or would I need to run some sort software based solution like unraid?

[LIGISTX]

13 minutes ago, MBWH said:

Hey everyone, this is my first post, so if I'm doing something wrong here or if this is the wrong section, please do tell me.

 

I'm currently parting out a mini-itx build on the x570 platform, and so far I've found only 1 mini-itx motherboard that actually has 2 PCIE 4.0 NVME slots: The Gigabyte Aorus X570i Pro Wifi.
Note: I do have a Ryzen 7 3700x already, which of course does support PCIE 4.0

The problem is: 1 slot is running off the chipset, and the other off the CPU, so here's my question:
Could I run 2 PCIE 4.0 NVME drives in raid 0 on this motherboard without problems?
If not, is there a mini-itx board that does support that, or would I need to run some sort software based solution like unraid?

The real question is why do you want RAID 0? Unless your doing actual computational workload which I assume isn’t the case seeing as your going itx, there is no performance gains to be had. On paper, sure, in the real world the only think you do is increase your chance of total data loss. 

[MBWH]

5 minutes ago, LIGISTX said:

The real question is why do you want RAID 0? Unless your doing actual computational workload which I assume isn’t the case seeing as your going itx, there is no performance gains to be had. On paper, sure, in the real world the only think you do is increase your chance of total data loss. 

That's a fair question, to be honest I just want the extra speed. I really did notice the difference when I got my 2nd 970 evo a while back and put them in raid0. Those are now running in a different system, so I need a replacement for them. Running PCIE 4.0 SSD's in raid0 would be a nice upgrade.

As for the build I'm doing now, I want to make a "No Compromises" small PC build, in which such an, admittedly, overkill storage solution would fit nicely.

Also, about the data loss argument: I have my own 24TB Raid5 array, accessible to my local network, where I back up my files regularly, so data loss isn't really a big argument.

[LIGISTX]

12 minutes ago, MBWH said:

That's a fair question, to be honest I just want the extra speed. I really did notice the difference when I got my 2nd 970 evo a while back and put them in raid0. Those are now running in a different system, so I need a replacement for them. Running PCIE 4.0 SSD's in raid0 would be a nice upgrade.
 

Did you also reformat? I genuinely can’t tell a difference between a sata iii ssd, raid 0 sata iii, and nvme. Even with raw photo editing I can’t tell a difference. But ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. 
 

I personally wouldn’t run RAID off of different controllers even if it was supported. I’d naively assume that will increase latency enough to negate any possible throughput improvement. 

[jj9987]

47 minutes ago, MBWH said:

Hey everyone, this is my first post, so if I'm doing something wrong here or if this is the wrong section, please do tell me.

 

I'm currently parting out a mini-itx build on the x570 platform, and so far I've found only 1 mini-itx motherboard that actually has 2 PCIE 4.0 NVME slots: The Gigabyte Aorus X570i Pro Wifi.
Note: I do have a Ryzen 7 3700x already, which of course does support PCIE 4.0

The problem is: 1 slot is running off the chipset, and the other off the CPU, so here's my question:
Could I run 2 PCIE 4.0 NVME drives in raid 0 on this motherboard without problems?
If not, is there a mini-itx board that does support that, or would I need to run some sort software based solution like unraid?

You could run just Storage Spaces, if you plan to use Windows on the system.

[MBWH]

9 minutes ago, jj9987 said:

You could run just Storage Spaces, if you plan to use Windows on the system.

Say I used that, would I be able to boot properly from the Virtual "Disk" if I were to install a separate instance of windows on it?

[Kilrah]

I have 2 NVMEs in RAID0 on my ITX 9900K build, obviously I'm not getting any improvements in peak transfer speed since they both connect to the chipset and the CPU-chipset link is only good for one's bandwidth anyway, but I'm occasionally working on shoots where I'll have to ingest like 500GB of footage from multiple cameras at the same time ASAP, and the improvement is notable versus a single SSD that either heats up and throttles or runs out of fast cache, having 2 of them just halves the load on each and keeps better sustained performance.

 

I have no idea of what's available as mobo RAID on AMD though.

 

13 minutes ago, MBWH said:

Say I used that, would I be able to boot properly from the Virtual "Disk" if I were to install a separate instance of windows on it?

Seems it's possible now.

[Arrogath]

38 minutes ago, MBWH said:

As for the build I'm doing now, I want to make a "No Compromises" small PC build, in which such an, admittedly, overkill storage solution would fit nicely.

I feel like the access latency and random read speed is going to matter more than the sustained speeds when you're already running a pcie gen 4 nvme, so a raid 0 setup doesn't make a lot of sense. You would probably be better off grabbing a high capacity QLC nvme drive as your second drive so that you have both the speed on your primary drive, and the extra storage space at relatively high speeds as well. Would probably be more worthwhile than running raid 0 across cpu/chipset lanes, although from what I understand Asus boards support it and I imagine most others do as well.

I run the 2TB corsair gen 4 nvme drive and it is never the bottleneck as is, so unless you have mass file transfers that need to be fast with less of a focus on data stability/security then by all means go raid 0. Only long sustained transfers are going to benefit from the setup

[MBWH]

2 minutes ago, Kilrah said:

I have 2 NVMEs in RAID0 on my ITX 9900K build, obviously I'm not getting any improvements in peak transfer speed since they both connect to the chipset and the CPU-chipset link is only good for one's bandwidth anyway, but I'm occasionally working on shoots where I'll have to ingest like 500GB of footage from multiple cameras at the same time ASAP, and the improvement is notable versus a single SSD that either heats up and throttles or runs out of fast cache, having 2 of them just halves the load on each and keeps better sustained performance.

 

I have no idea of what's available as mobo RAID on AMD though.

 

Seems it's possible now.

Ah, guess I'll see how Windows Storage Spaces does and if I can boot properly. I can only hope there won't be too much latency issues.

[MBWH]

29 minutes ago, Arrogath said:

I feel like the access latency and random read speed is going to matter more than the sustained speeds when you're already running a pcie gen 4 nvme, so a raid 0 setup doesn't make a lot of sense. You would probably be better off grabbing a high capacity QLC nvme drive as your second drive so that you have both the speed on your primary drive, and the extra storage space at relatively high speeds as well. Would probably be more worthwhile than running raid 0 across cpu/chipset lanes, although from what I understand Asus boards support it and I imagine most others do as well.

I run the 2TB corsair gen 4 nvme drive and it is never the bottleneck as is, so unless you have mass file transfers that need to be fast with less of a focus on data stability/security then by all means go raid 0. Only long sustained transfers are going to benefit from the setup

What you said makes sense, I know. I was just wondering if it was possible at all.

I like crazy and unconventional setups, even if it's overkill or doesn't make much sense.

I will be getting myself 2 drives at some point, regardless, so I'll tell you how it went

[Arrogath]

21 minutes ago, MBWH said:

What you said makes sense, I know. I was just wondering if it was possible at all.

I like crazy and unconventional setups, even if it's overkill or doesn't make much sense.

I will be getting myself 2 drives at some point, regardless, so I'll tell you how it went

Oh I hear you on the crazy setups, I was one of the weirdos running raid 0 sata ssd when they first came out in more affordable small sizes and were terribly unreliable. I was also one of the people that bought Bulldozer FX series because it was fun to overclock, eventually drove myself crazy and bought into Haswell for some nice strong and stable performance

[MBWH]

14 minutes ago, Arrogath said:

Oh I hear you on the crazy setups, I was one of the weirdos running raid 0 sata ssd when they first came out in more affordable small sizes and were terribly unreliable. I was also one of the people that bought Bulldozer FX series because it was fun to overclock, eventually drove myself crazy and bought into Haswell for some nice strong and stable performance

I did that too! I had 2 shady used 60GB SSDs in raid 0 quite a while ago. Also, I'm typing this on my "work" PC with a Xeon e5 2697 v2

[Kilrah]

I had an OCZ Revodrive back in 2010, aka 2 55GB SSDs RAID0'd on a PCIe card

It's still laying around somewhere in my mess, not sure if it still works though