Super fast NVMe RAID comes to Threadripper
A week later than planned, AMD has released a free driver update for the X399 platform to support NVMe RAID.
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The driver allows X399 motherboards to combine multiple NVMe SSDs together into a RAID 0, 1, or 10 array, which will greatly enhance disk performance or data integrity.
Benchmarking carried out by AMD shows that the platform allows for a throughput of 21.2GB/s from six 512GB Samsung 960 Pro NVMe SSDs in RAID0.
But there are a couple of caveats.
The first is that X399 motherboards will require BIOS updates before they will support NVMe RAID, so when it will be available for your system will depend on your motherboard vendor.
The second -- and perhaps more important -- is that currently the NVMe RAID driver is in beta, and as such things may go wrong, so you might want to test this before rolling it out onto systems you rely on.
There are also some known issues to be aware of:
1. Users with an existing RAID array cannot perform an in-place driver or BIOS upgrade to add NVMe RAID support to their system.
a) Users with an existing SATA RAID configuration must back up data on the SATA RAID array, and break down that array, before proceeding with any BIOS update or driver installation containing NVMe RAID support.
b) If the existing SATA RAID array is a bootable configuration with an operating system, then a fresh install of Windows 10 will be required.
2. A motherboard BIOS update is required to support NVMe RAID. After updating to a supporting BIOS, the disk configuration must be changed to RAID (from SATA or AHCI). This BIOS menu entry is often labeled "SATA Mode" or "SATA Configuration."