Most INSANE SSD RAID Setup – IT BOOTS!

The video begins by framing the high speed storage space as a bottleneck that needed to be removed, inspired by Computex discussions about M.2 and NVMe SSDs. The host explains the plan to build a four-drive SSD RAID using Samsung 960 Pro NVMe drives, each with 512 GB, aiming for extremely high sequential read and write speeds and a compact form factor. Initial roadblocks are introduced, including the challenge of finding a motherboard with enough M.2 slots and the need for an additional PCIe card to manage the drives. The team discusses booting Windows from the array and explores Intel's Virtual RAID on CPU (vROC) technology, noting that hardware keys and bundle requirements complicate access to bootable NVMe RAID. AMD steps in with a driver update promising a bootable RAID path, but the process proves intricate and documentation is poor, requiring careful experimentation and persistence. Throughout the setup, the crew emphasizes the importance of balancing loads across multiple PCIe dies on a Threadripper platform, a necessary step to avoid bottlenecks on the 11 GB per second link created by linking two dies. After multiple driver iterations, BIOS pre-release testing, and balancing the Samsung drives between dies, they boot in pure UEFI mode and configure the array with a RAID utility, inviting Windows to install onto a 2 TB bootable array. The moment of truth arrives as they run Iometer with a 1 MB transfer size, revealing unprecedented performance: about 12 GB/s reads and 7.3 GB/s writes, well beyond a single SSD, with the NTFS bootable array functioning smoothly. The hosts compare these results to a single 960 Pro, which delivers roughly 3.5 GB/s reads and 2 GB/s writes, underscoring the dramatic performance gains but also acknowledging that the technology is still in early stages and driver support remains a work in progress. The video closes with a nod to Samsung and a plan to revisit the project once Intel and software ecosystems mature, inviting viewers to like, subscribe, and explore the featured products and community forums for further discussion.

Topics · technology · hardware · storage · pc_builds · servers_and_workstations