Enough lanes!?

[Candelstick]

So I'm trying to plan out my new build and I'm not sure I'll have enough PCIe lanes but I'm not sure how they work also.

Cpu: 5900x

MB: x570 meg ACE

GPU: 6900xt

OS Drive: 980 pro 256gb

mass storage: asus m.2 hyper with (2-4)1tb 970 pros in RAID 0

Will this work?

Thank you in advance.

[Breeksta]

[Breeksta]

Then you would have: 
2 x PCIe 4.0/3.0 x16 slots (PCI_E1, PCI_E3) - 3rd Gen AMD Ryzen support PCIe 4.0 x16/x0, x8/x8 modes
1 x PCIe 4.0/3.0 x16 slot (PCI_E5, supports x4 mode)

1 x M2_4 Socket with E key (PCIe ×2, USB 2.0, I2C, SDIO, UART and PCM)

&

2 x M.2 slots (M2_2/M2_3, Key M)*  -- PCIe ×4, SATA and SMBus


I think you can use M2_2 and M2_3 for a raid. If you want to use a PCIe x16 slot you can put up to 4 on a card and play around with what you can get to work.

[Bombastinator]

27 minutes ago, Candelstick said:

So I'm trying to plan out my new build and I'm not sure I'll have enough PCIe lanes but I'm not sure how they work also.

Cpu: 5900x

MB: x570 meg ACE

GPU: 6900xt

OS Drive: 980 pro 256gb

mass storage: asus m.2 hyper with (2-4)1tb 970 pros in RAID 0

Will this work?

Thank you in advance.

This seems to me like a very strange thing to do.  Saturated SataIII is so fast already that while nvme can be multiple times faster unless the files are gargantuan the difference is barely noticible. Unless you’re transferring terabyte sized files it just doesn’t make much of a difference. You’re making a drive 4 times more fragile to double the extra speed you didn’t need in the first place. 
 

To answer the question though: Maybe. Sort of.  First of all hardware RAID doesn’t work at all with m.2.  You have to use software raid so it’s going to eat processor cycles.  Luckily you have a whole bunch to spare.   That cpu I believe has 24 lanes. 16 for the cpu, 4 for a pcie4 nvme drive and 4 to the motherboard chipset.  The motherboard chipset splits those 4 pcie4 lanes into a bunch of other stuff. 
The way to make RAID0 work and not gimp itself you would be to make sure BOTH m.2 drives hang off the chipset.  I don’t know enough about that motherboard to know if that’s even possible.  Then you would have to get a software raid0 going between the two.   

[Breeksta]

13 minutes ago, Bombastinator said:

This seems to me like a very strange thing to do.

(45) X570 RAID0 Benchmarked: Maximum Performance, but increased Chipset Power Consumption? - YouTube
(45) Most INSANE SSD RAID Setup – IT BOOTS! - YouTube

There are some very strange people in this world lol

[Candelstick]

48 minutes ago, Bombastinator said:

This seems to me like a very strange thing to do.  Saturated SataIII is so fast already that while nvme can be multiple times faster unless the files are gargantuan the difference is barely noticible. Unless you’re transferring terabyte sized files it just doesn’t make much of a difference. You’re making a drive 4 times more fragile to double the extra speed you didn’t need in the first place. 
 

To answer the question though: Maybe. Sort of.  First of all hardware RAID doesn’t work at all with m.2.  You have to use software raid so it’s going to eat processor cycles.  Luckily you have a whole bunch to spare.   That cpu I believe has 24 lanes. 16 for the cpu, 4 for a pcie4 nvme drive and 4 to the motherboard chipset.  The motherboard chipset splits those 4 pcie4 lanes into a bunch of other stuff. 
The way to make RAID0 work and not gimp itself you would be to make sure BOTH m.2 drives hang off the chipset.  I don’t know enough about that motherboard to know if that’s even possible.  Then you would have to get a software raid0 going between the two.   

My main reason was I wanted super fast storage for games but if it's coming at that great of a cost I'll just get the 980pro 2tb when available or a auros x16 card. 

 

I figured it wouldn't work the way I wanted it to or I would have seen people doing the hyper m.2 build all over Youtube.

 

I really appreciate your input and the big headache you saved me.

[Bombastinator]

36 minutes ago, Breeksta said:

(45) X570 RAID0 Benchmarked: Maximum Performance, but increased Chipset Power Consumption? - YouTube
(45) Most INSANE SSD RAID Setup – IT BOOTS! - YouTube

There are some very strange people in this world lol

Reviewers and testers don’t really count they do things just to do them rather than actually use them for something. 

[Bombastinator]

7 minutes ago, Candelstick said:

My main reason was I wanted super fast storage for games but if it's coming at that great of a cost I'll just get the 980pro 2tb when available or a auros x16 card. 

 

I figured it wouldn't work the way I wanted it to or I would have seen people doing the hyper m.2 build all over Youtube.

 

I really appreciate your input and the big headache you saved me.

The deal is even a cheapass SSD can saturate sataIII, and while nvme is multiple times faster currently it is not usefully faster.  Emphasis on currently.  This may change.  It hasn’t yet though.  When it does a lot of people may be raid0ing a lot of pcie4 SSDs.  By the time it comes to pass though the current crop of pcie4 nvme SSDs are only barely fast enough to saturate pcie3.  Things will be better, faster, and cheaper by the time they are needed, so buying one now doesn’t make a lot of sense when a better cheaper one could be bought when you actually have a use for it.

[brob]

SSD RAID can behave differently from that of hdd. One would see better performance in RAID 0 with large serial I/o. Most pc I/o is relatively small random blocks. There is generally no significant performance difference between RAID 0 and a single drive in that case. Certainly the difference is not perceptible.

 

Given the fragility of RAID 0, I don't think the approach is optimal. Consider a 4TB unit instead of 4x1TB.

[Candelstick]

7 hours ago, brob said:

SSD RAID can behave differently from that of hdd. One would see better performance in RAID 0 with large serial I/o. Most pc I/o is relatively small random blocks. There is generally no significant performance difference between RAID 0 and a single drive in that case. Certainly the difference is not perceptible.

 

Given the fragility of RAID 0, I don't think the approach is optimal. Consider a 4TB unit instead of 4x1TB.

That's what I was looking into, I liked the option to have 2 and then be able to add 2 more. I just wasn't sure if the 4 drives on the m.2 hyper acted as one drive or if it needed to RAID. I like doing crazy things

[brob]

1 hour ago, Candelstick said:

That's what I was looking into, I liked the option to have 2 and then be able to add 2 more. I just wasn't sure if the 4 drives on the m.2 hyper acted as one drive or if it needed to RAID. I like doing crazy things

 

Did you see https://www.asus.com/support/FAQ/1037507?

 

The card simply maps PCIe lanes. Each m.2 drive is a separate drive. On the X570 MEG ACE the 20 available lanes are divided 8, 8, and 4 for the m.2 connector. (Plus another 4 that use chipset lanes.) Eight would be needed for the gpu leaving an 8 lane and a 4 lane (chipset) slot. Realistically that would mean just one m.2 hyper with two drives.

 

If one is willing to throttle the gpu theoretically it could use the four chipset lanes (PCI_E5) which would allow two m.2 hyper cards each supporting two m.2 NVMe drives.