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Bootable VROC RAID 10, VMD domains, and PCIe lanes

User5437
Level 7
Intended Hardware/RAID Setup:

As I understand it from this picture, bootable RAID arrays have a maximum of 4 supported drives because they must reside within a single VMD domain and non-bootable arrays can span multiple VMD domains.

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I don't know how VMDs are distributed on this board so I don't know if the arrays can be configured in this way:

Onboard:
M.2_1 (lower M.2 slot, too short for a 905P) Data drive 7

M.2_2 (upper M.2 slot, shares bandwidth with the U.2 port and may be PCH only) No drive


DIMM.2:
M.2_1 Boot drive 1

M.2_2 Boot drive 2


M.2 x16 Card 1:
M.2_1 Boot drive 3

M.2_2 Boot drive 4

M.2_3 Data drive 1

M.2_4 Data drive 2


M.2 x16 Card 2:
M.2_1 Data drive 3

M.2_2 Data drive 4

M.2_3 Data drive 5

M.2_4 Data drive 6


Will this configuration work?

Also, the CPU supports 44 PCIe lanes and there will be an x16 graphics card, how many 970 EVOs would need to be cancelled to keep the graphics card running at a full x16?
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23 REPLIES 23

machproo
Level 7
Hello, I have a Premium Vroc key on my Rog Dominus Extreme and I can guarantee that the Western Digital SN750 are recognized.
90820908219082290823I have at your disposal the screenshots that prove it !
There is a bug in the Rog Dominus Extreme Bios regarding\ Advanced\ Cpu Storage. See the photos attached
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It sould be like this :
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There is also a more serious problem with sharing VMD0 between PCIEX16_2 and PCIEX16_4 that creates configuration instability. See the explanation in the attached diagram :
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machproo wrote:
Hello, I have a Premium Vroc key on my Rog Dominus Extreme and I can guarantee that the Western Digital SN750 are recognized.


There is no contradiction. I was referencing Intel official list of supported drives from November 2021. That does NOT mean that there are NOT other third-party SSDs that work with Xeon on a C621 board. It just means that Intel is not officially supporting them YET. I would not surprised if there would be many more 3-rd party drives than Intel officially listed in their doc that would also work in VROC on a Xeon/C621 set up. Intel is always slow in updating these tables and they are almost never complete. (and If you read the right-side table first few sentences, Intel even recognizes that the list is not complete). so sure WD750 also work in VROC. congrats.

Still, my main point is the same as before: third-party SSD VROCs are only supported on the Xeon/C621 boards not on i9 C/CE on X299 boards. VROC on i9 X/XE on X299 boards has to be done out of Intel SSDs only (and very specific intel SSDs at that - see intel doc I posted above).

It was approx. three years ago when I bought a "standard" Vroc key for €20.-, because, for whatever reason, the "Intel only" Vroc key was >€100.-, at least here in Europe.

So I can confirm, that the standard key is working 100% with a R6A, no problem at all with x299 boards.

Further on, I can confirm that 4x 512Gb Lenovo drives which I bought for $50.- each, also three years ago, do work on a Hyper card in bootable Vroc raid0 with a "standard" key. BUT ATTENTION: those "Lenovo labeled" drives are in fact Intel origin 7600p Data Canter (DC) drives. Please have a look at my PC specification details for more info. For comparison, I did a quick bench test:

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machproo
Level 7
A Premium Vroc key costs around US$250 or less and for that price you can use mainstream SSDs, which justifies the investment. I also have a VROCISSDMOD key. I'm going to replace the premium with this key to see which SSDs disappear.