VROC Bootable Raid with Intel 900p - when will this be supported in the BIOS?

[CharlieH]

VROC Bootable Raid with Intel 900p - when will this be supported in the BIOS? I just tried 4 Intel 900ps on a Hyper M.2 x16 card and when I hit create Raid it just went back to the previous screen. Maybe I am doing something wrong? I did disable CSM first. And my Hyper M.2 x16 card is set to VROC on its slot in the BIOS. I did see the 4 drives. But no luck putting them in RAID so I can boot from them.

[Brighttail]

Abaidor wrote:
Maybe it's useful if you need RAID 5 & 10? Why did they put a port for it on the motherboard and then mess up like this is beyond comprehension. They should really allow any NVME drive to work on any RAID configuration with the key installed.

The key is really for the XEON platform where you can do exactly as you want, use a 3rd party in raid 0,1,5,10. Well not any but many.

[Abaidor]

Brighttail wrote:
The key is really for the XEON platform where you can do exactly as you want, use a 3rd party in raid 0,1,5,10. Well not any but many.

Sure but it was Intel + Asus that promoted it on this motherboard so I am just saying. I guess they could always open it up but they won't because of XEON.

Anyway it's in the big box with the leftovers + packaging from my build now and I will most probably forget about it within the next months.

[Brighttail]

Abaidor wrote:
Sure but it was Intel + Asus that promoted it on this motherboard so I am just saying. I guess they could always open it up but they won't because of XEON.

Anyway it's in the big box with the leftovers + packaging from my build now and I will most probably forget about it within the next months.

I plugged mine in and also unplugged it and saw no difference in performance with my two 900ps in RAID 0.

[restsugavan]

Next from VROC we will get Cascade Lake X which support 2933MT/sec DDR4. Bandwidth of single channel around 23.464GB/sec for DDR4 piece.
Which those bandwidth the 3DXpoint DIMM or DDR-T or any names referred to Non Voltalized based DRAM will useful it. Those will wipe out VROC
Solution on X299 and C620 platform easily. Imagining dual 3DXpoint DIMM paired to be RAID-0 Boost. Forget those VROC keys and keep your money
For Cascade Lake X better.*

[Brighttail]

restsugavan wrote:
Next from VROC we will get Cascade Lake X which support 2933MT/sec DDR4. Bandwidth of single channel around 23.464GB/sec for DDR4 piece.
Which those bandwidth the 3DXpoint DIMM or DDR-T or any names referred to Non Voltalized based DRAM will useful it. Those will wipe out VROC
Solution on X299 and C620 platform easily. Imagining dual 3DXpoint DIMM paired to be RAID-0 Boost. Forget those VROC keys and keep your money
For Cascade Lake X better.*

Well we'll see what "requirements" Intel puts out for this, like they did VROC. As it is right now, I was using two Intel 900p in VROC as a bootable RAID 0 drive to see how things went. It went well, with no issues. Unfortunately the speeds were simply disappointing. A single Intel 900p has random 4k speeds of 320 read and 300 write. When you add RAID 0 that causes latency. We also know that VROC RAID is slower than standard WIndows software RAID. On top of that the SPECTRE/MELTDOWN fixes, slows these drives down even slower. So when I checked my speeds with the RAID 0 Bootable VROC drive, my speeds were a full 55% slower than non-RAID. If i take out the SPECTRE fix and go back to an earlier BIOS it is still 46% slower.

So simply put, while having a bootable RAID 0 drive is nice, it really isn't worth it as the every day speed plummets. If for some reason you are doing a lot of rendering or file movement, which I would have no idea why someone would do this with a drive using RAID 0, then this configuration is simply not useful.

Even putting my OS on a Samsung 960 pro and using RAID 0 as a non-bootable drive using windows software to run my games and apps, I'm still sacrificing about 15% of the random 4k speed. I can accept that but in the end I opted for one of the Intel 900p for my OS and some games and my other as a dedicated games/app drive.

[restsugavan]

Brighttail wrote:
Well we'll see what "requirements" Intel puts out for this, like they did VROC. As it is right now, I was using two Intel 900p in VROC as a bootable RAID 0 drive to see how things went. It went well, with no issues. Unfortunately the speeds were simply disappointing. A single Intel 900p has random 4k speeds of 320 read and 300 write. When you add RAID 0 that causes latency. We also know that VROC RAID is slower than standard WIndows software RAID. On top of that the SPECTRE/MELTDOWN fixes, slows these drives down even slower. So when I checked my speeds with the RAID 0 Bootable VROC drive, my speeds were a full 55% slower than non-RAID. If i take out the SPECTRE fix and go back to an earlier BIOS it is still 46% slower.

So simply put, while having a bootable RAID 0 drive is nice, it really isn't worth it as the every day speed plummets. If for some reason you are doing a lot of rendering or file movement, which I would have no idea why someone would do this with a drive using RAID 0, then this configuration is simply not useful.

Even putting my OS on a Samsung 960 pro and using RAID 0 as a non-bootable drive using windows software to run my games and apps, I'm still sacrificing about 15% of the random 4k speed. I can accept that but in the end I opted for one of the Intel 900p for my OS and some games and my other as a dedicated games/app drive.

I see. As Intel told you from that mail. X299 may not getting full function of VROCs. They had dedicate VROCs Key that only
allow Intel SSD to joyful with X299. However when studying from Skylake SP microarchitect many time. They are more overhead
on VROC than single NVME used. Let's consider here.

1. The CPU to VMD access may interrupt by many transactions from GPU/DRAM/DMI etc. VROC bandwidth may loss from those transactions.
Many transactions being slowdown our VMDs.

2. For Multi GPU system those transactions upper scaling by number of GPU which you used. More than 1 GPU will downgrade VROC bandwidth
which we could not avoid.

3. Cascade Lake X /SP change those 3DXpoint SSD to be DIMM form. CPU to DRAM bandwidth may minimum those overhead from 1 and 2 a lot.
I think the best way we must waiting for those solution better. Collect our money for it is not bad idea. buddy