Raid 50 on Asus Hyper M.2 or Similar cards?

[S w a t s o n]

I wondering what it would take to make RAID 50 happen across 8 NVME SSD's. I am just wondering how the system handles the cards and if I would need a raid card to run RAID 50. I think the ideal setup would be raid 0 the nvme drives in each card together and then raid 5 the two cards together so that only 1 set of parity is written rather then than nesting 2 raid 5 arrays in a raid 0 array with 2 sets of parity. I dont want to run RAID 10 because it would halve capacity.

 

I also have a suspicion this would require a raid card, is this true? The platform would probably be zen 2 so lets assume it's going to be bootable.

https://www.asus.com/Motherboard-Accessories/HYPER-M-2-X16-CARD/

This is the card if you havent seen it

[NelizMastr]

Why do you want this, exactly? You're bandwidth limited already, and RAID50 is pretty bad for redundancy. You're essentially striping across two RAID5s which means that when one RAID5 is gone, all data is gone as well. Go RAID10 instead. Less capacity, but better speeds and safety.

[S w a t s o n]

1 minute ago, NelizMastr said:

Why do you want this, exactly? You're bandwidth limited already, and RAID50 is pretty bad for redundancy. You're essentially striping across two RAID5s which means that when one RAID5 is gone, all data is gone as well. Go RAID10 instead. Less capacity, but better speeds and safety.

Bandwidth limited how? I want it because I want the fastest drive I can get with a slight amount of protection. Like I said in my post I would have a single raid 5 array on top of the two raid 0 arrays

[NelizMastr]

6 minutes ago, S w a t s o n said:

Bandwidth limited how? I want it because I want the fastest drive I can get with a slight amount of protection. Like I said in my post I would have a single raid 5 array on top of the two raid 0 arrays

That's not what RAID50 is. You don't RAID5 stripes, you stripe RAID5s. And bandwidth limited is the issue because it still talks over PCIe. If you run 970 Evos you'll get afwully close to the limits of the PCIe interface with that many cards  

 

Just make your mind up on what you really want here, and whether your workload benefits from such a massive speed bump. I'm just saying you should consider that the limiting factor likely won't be the SSDs but other factors. 

[S w a t s o n]

Just now, NelizMastr said:

That's not what RAID50 is. You don't RAID5 stripes, you stripe RAID5s. And bandwidth limited is the issue because it still talks over PCIe. If you run 980 Evos you'll get afwully close to the limits of the PCIe interface with that many cards  

 

Just make your mind up on what you really want here, and whether your workload benefits from such a massive speed bump. I'm just saying you should consider that the limiting factor likely won't be the SSDs but other factors. 

I see that the default configuration shown in examples of raid 50 is raid 0 on top of multiple raid 5's but that's because of the usualy use case for RAID 5 where you want the additional coverage of having more than one set of parity. I only want one set of parity. I am ok with the fact that i would only have one set of parity but it should be possible and it would still be raid 50 or raid 05 if you prefer.

It's not for a workload it's for the giggles.

[NelizMastr]

3 minutes ago, S w a t s o n said:

I see that the default configuration shown in examples of raid 50 is raid 0 on top of multiple raid 5's but that's because of the usualy use case for RAID 5 where you want the additional coverage of having more than one set of parity. I only want one set of parity. I am ok with the fact that i would only have one set of parity but it should be possible and it would still be raid 50 or raid 05 if you prefer.

But there is no RAID0+5. It's one of the few combinations that aren't supported by any RAID controller, either onboard or dedicated. Again, what you're looking for is RAID10 probably  

[S w a t s o n]

7 minutes ago, NelizMastr said:

And bandwidth limited is the issue because it still talks over PCIe. If you run 980 Evos you'll get afwully close to the limits of the PCIe interface with that many cards

I would run them in straight up raid 0 if I had the balls to do it. However would it then be better to nest raid 0 or just raid the 8 drives? Would it matter? I know I would be close to PCIE limits with high end drives, that's the idea.

[S w a t s o n]

So basically I still need to figure out if I need a raid card to raid these together even in raid 10 or just raid 0

Edit: Well looks like raid 0 will just work, I know raid 10 on mobo is common too but not sure i'd want to use that for this