AMD X399 Platform Lacks NVMe RAID Booting Support

[erocker]

But I can still raid non-boot drives. I'm fine with that... If I were to buy a Threadripper... Which I'm not.

 

[mcraygsx]

I am kind of astonished at using objective language here. Did TECHPOWERUP not get their customized review kit from AMD?.
"Ryzen Threadripper HEDT platform may have an Achilles's heel after all" is too far fetched even for Techpowerup.

Reminds me of how HARDOCP used to trash AMD every chance they get especially right after Kyle did not get invited to one of AMD Polaris event. But attitude changed right after they send him couple of samples.

For real there might be less then 1% of TR consumes who would RAID 0 two of their PCI x4 NVME drives.

 

[cdawall]

I am kind of astonished at using objective language here. Did TECHPOWERUP not get their customized review kit from AMD?.
"Ryzen Threadripper HEDT platform may have an Achilles's heel after all" is too far fetched even for Techpowerup.

Reminds me of how HARDOCP used to trash AMD every chance they get especially right after Kyle did not get invited to one of AMD Polaris event. But attitude changed right after they send him couple of samples.

For real there might be less then 1% of TR consumes who would RAID 0 two of their PCI x4 NVME drives.

So? That doesn't mean it shouldn't support it for the 1% who do

 

[mcraygsx]

So? That doesn't mean it shouldn't support it for the 1% who do

Once more again if u cant read! Of course these small issues should be reported for sake of Journalism but using biased/strong words like "Achilles's heel" is taking it too far. This is just one disadvantage that was found and reviews are not even out yet. What happens when next flaw is found in TR. We going to call it Total disappointment and not recommended?

It takes just one person to start the Fire and headlines like such do a pretty good job.

 

[cdawall]

Once more again if u cant read! Of course these small issues should be reported for sake of Journalism but using strong words like "Achilles's heel" is taking it too far.

I don't disagree with that. I imagine the Achilles heel will more likely be infinity fabric connected the modules.

 

[notb]

For real there might be less then 1% of TR consumes who would RAID 0 two of their PCI x4 NVME drives.

This is quite an interesting estimation...

I'm fairly sure quite an opposite observation is true.
I'd say that for a significant part of people that actually buy into HEDT, disks only come in RAID setups.

It's a bit like if TR was - for whatever reason - not usable for solving PDE. Who cares, right?

But here comes the actual problem.
Threadripper is known to be just a cut-down EPYC server CPU. Does that mean EPYC can't boot from a RAID as well?

 

[john_]

I don't see a huge problem here. I mean if someone wants to boot at 4.3 seconds instead of 5.6 seconds, yes this is a problem. In every other case it is just an annoyance of having probably one more drive and one more partition in your system and nothing more.

 

[thesmokingman]

I am kind of astonished at using objective language here. Did TECHPOWERUP not get their customized review kit from AMD?.
"Ryzen Threadripper HEDT platform may have an Achilles's heel after all" is too far fetched even for Techpowerup.

Reminds me of how HARDOCP used to trash AMD every chance they get especially right after Kyle did not get invited to one of AMD Polaris event. But attitude changed right after they send him couple of samples.

For real there might be less then 1% of TR consumes who would RAID 0 two of their PCI x4 NVME drives.

Yea, I've noticed the huge upswing in the anti-amd stance.

 

[newtekie1]

Not true. It works with all NVMe drives.

You don't need any keys/dongles to have a bootable raid 1 or 0 nvme raid configuration on x299 with ANY nvme drive.
Vroc is a different feature.

Yes, after doing some research which I admit I should have done before commenting, that is sort of correct.

If the slot is wired to the chipset, then yes you can use any brand drive in RAID and more than just RAID-0. Of course, this has the disadvantage of routing the data through the slower chipset path instead of directly to the CPU. It will limit the access speed from the rest of the system to the NVMe array to about that of a PCI-E 3.0 x4 link. If the slot is wired to the CPU, then you have to use VROC for RAID.

 

[Aquinus]

This isn't SATA3. If 4x lanes of PCI-E 3.0 (which is ~3.84GB/s,) isn't enough for your boot drive, then you might as well just put everything you need into system memory.

Silly Windows users.

 

[The Von Matrices]

With AMD announcing that it is deprecating Crossfire and now not supporting bootable NVMe RAIDs, those 60 PCIe lanes that everyone was ogling over look more and more superfluous every day.

 

[cdawall]

This isn't SATA3. If 4x lanes of PCI-E 3.0 (which is ~3.84GB/s,) isn't enough for your boot drive, then you might as well just put everything you need into system memory.

With AMD announcing that it is deprecating Crossfire and now not supporting bootable NVMe RAIDs, those 60 PCIe lanes that everyone was ogling over look more and more superfluous every day.

Depends how efficient the CPU is. If it can pull in $3-4 a day and support 8-12 video cards then the platform will be phenomenal to miners. Threadripper and 12 vega cards per rig, has a nice ring to it.

 

[notb]

Yea, I've noticed the huge upswing in the anti-amd stance.

Well... I've noticed a huge shift of discussion topics from gaming to server/workstation-related because of how Zen is much better at compressing files than running games.
Sad part is that, while discussion themes changed, the people (their knowledge) didn't.

When a thread is about RAID and majority of comments is about NVMe speed and OS boot time, it kind of says it all...

 

[LogitechFan]

but but but you still have all those picex lanes for all your...... 5400rpm hdds to connect muahahaha

 

[Aquinus]

Depends how efficient the CPU is. If it can pull in $3-4 a day and support 8-12 video cards then the platform will be phenomenal to miners. Threadripper and 12 vega cards per rig, has a nice ring to it.

What does mining have to do with running NVMe devices in RAID other than using up PCI-E lanes that could be used for GPUs instead of NVMe? Very few situations require highly available persistent storage I/O of over 2GB/s and in those situations, I would argue that using an NVMe device suited to using more PCI-E lanes would be a better option than doing RAID, particularly for small file or random read/write operations.

My bigger point what that disk I/O has got fast enough where RAID-0 doesn't make a whole lot of sense. I did it with SATA3 not even for speed but, because at the time, RAID-0 of two 120GBs was cheaper than a single 240GB and just happened to be a little faster in certain situations. However, with how cheap SSD storage has become and how fast NVMe devices are getting, I see very little reason to want to do RAID-0 with NVMe devices. If you need something that fast but, require a replica, I would argue that something more eventually consistent would allow you to retain more performance while sacrificing a minute or so worth of data being written in the case of catastrophe.

All in all, I think that this article is a non-issue and isn't even worthy of the attention it is receiving. It's not a realistic need that solves any real tangible problem.

 

[cdawall]

What does mining have to do with running NVMe devices in RAID other than using up PCI-E lanes that could be used for GPUs instead of NVMe?

The question was "What is the point of 60 lanes if?"

That is one scenario that would use them. Another would be deep learning, cad/cam, video capture etc. Plenty of uses for pcie lanes outside of nvme devices.

 

[nem..]

 

[Dave65]

You can't boot off of software raid.

THIS!

 

[SKD007]

I just placed order for a M.2 NVMe for my C6H.. hope it will be really fast for windows and page file.

 

[Nkd]

OMG! what a deal breaker! Buy a server cpu if you need all the server features. lol

 

[notb]

OMG! what a deal breaker! Buy a server cpu if you need all the server features. lol

RAID is not a server feature. It's used in consumer PCs, but more importantly in workstations. That is, if Threadripper is meant to be a workstation CPU (which is unlikely).

As you've said, it is servers where RAID becomes crucial. And the worst thing is that TR is an EPYC underneath. So will EPYC be able to boot from RAID?

 

[ssdpro]

Yea, I've noticed the huge upswing in the anti-amd stance.

Way too emotional. Just read the first page... lots of pro AMD there.

 

[Aquinus]

THIS!

@hellrazor's quote applies. In Linux, there is absolutely nothing stopping me from using mdadm to do software raid for root. Basically, only the kernel needs to be outside the software RAID to get the system started, which means you could literally have something as simple as a flash drive to get you to be able to boot from a software raid array.

Silly Windows users.

 

[newtekie1]

This isn't SATA3. If 4x lanes of PCI-E 3.0 (which is ~3.84GB/s,) isn't enough for your boot drive, then you might as well just put everything you need into system memory.

Thing is, a single NVMe drive theoretically could use all the bandwidth of a PCI-E 3.0 x4 link. So if you are RAIDing the boot drive for the purpose of increased speed, the x4 link to the chipset becomes the bottleneck. That is whole reason why we are moving towards connecting the drives directly to the CPUs.

 

[Aquinus]

Thing is, a single NVMe drive theoretically could use all the bandwidth of a PCI-E 3.0 x4 link. So if you are RAIDing the boot drive for the purpose of increased speed, the x4 link to the chipset becomes the bottleneck. That is whole reason why we are moving towards connecting the drives directly to the CPUs.

We are talking about boot device here, aren't we? It's not like you can't do this after the machine has started. My point is for how edge-case this is, there are options to get around it that aren't unreasonable.