can RAID 10 with NVME drives happen on Ryzen boards?

[terroralpha]

hello

I know it's theoretically possible to have RAID 10 on Intel's X99 platform if the CPU has 40 lanes, the CPU with deal 8x lanes to 5 slots and 4 can be populated by SSDs, but can Ryzen do that?

the reason I ask is that I sold one my extra Ryzen motherboards on eBay (at a loss....) and the buyer wants to return it because, and I quote, "Website listing did not include qualification that NVME or PCiE Sata is not allowed for RAID 10"

and that stomped me. is there something I don't know? can you really do NVME RAID between slots that are 8x PCI E 3.0 and 1x 2.0? or this guy just nuts?

 

[alucasa]

Bullcrap reason for return. I bet the buyer didn't like what he saw and came up with that.

 

[Wastedslayer]

I'm not sure if Ryzen has enough PCI-E lanes for that many drives. At minimum it would be 4 drives which is 16 lanes. If you factor in a GPU that would put you up to 32 lanes. This is barring anything using 1 or 2 lanes here and there.

Doesn't Ryzen only have 24?

I would think this would be on the buyer for not properly researching the capabilities of the platform.

 

[bug]

Afaik, RAID10 is alive and well on Ryzen: http://techreport.com/news/31228/amd-shows-off-ryzen-ready-chipsets-and-motherboards-at-ces
Unless I'm missing something.

@Wastedslayer You don't actually need 4 PCIe lane for each drive, you could get away with fewer, current drives don't saturate all that bandwidth anyway. Still, a fishy reason for a return when AMD themselves don't advertise PCIe RAID.

 

[terroralpha]

I see the general consensus here is that he is an idiot. I told him I'll take it back, but he eats the return shipping and a restocking fee.

Doesn't Ryzen only have 24?

AMD left out a lot for details. the CPU does have 24 lanes, but 4 are used to communicate with the chipset. so only 20 are actually usable. 4 of those are permanently attached to the M.2 slot. you can't move the lanes around on Ryzen like you can with Intel boards. that leaves only enough lanes for 2 slots with PCI E 3 lanes.

and what's funny is that when I wrote this in my MSI X370 xpower and AsRock X370 fatal1ty pro motherboard reviews, both reviews were first posted on newegg, then deleted. but stupid reviews like "ZOMG ryzen is teh dead" (something to that effect) are still up there.

I was able to reassign lanes on my X99 build just by moving hardware around. it was super easy. not to mention that now I have half the PCI E lanes to play around around with. I really wanted to support AMD, but I'm starting to regret it.

Afaik, RAID10 is alive and well on Ryzen: http://techreport.com/news/31228/amd-shows-off-ryzen-ready-chipsets-and-motherboards-at-ces
Unless I'm missing something.

@Wastedslayer You don't actually need 4 PCIe lane for each drive, you could get away with fewer, current drives don't saturate all that bandwidth anyway. Still, a fishy reason for a return when AMD themselves don't advertise PCIe RAID.

actually pretty much any SSD will saturate the PCI E 2.0 slots on Ryzen boards pretty easily. the PCI E 2.0 slots (that you will to use for NVME RAID) on Ryzen boards only have 1 lane. that gives you a maximum THEORETICAL bandwidth of 500MB/s, which in reality will probably end up being 450MB/s. even if you hit the max theoretical speed, which you won't, it would still be slower than SATA III ports. while it's true that you don't need 4x PCI E 3.0 lanes, you sure as hell should have at least 4x PCI E 2.0 lanes for NVME drives since most of them can hit 2000MB/s pretty easily without RAID.

I got a 1TB Samsung 960 EVO in my build, and that gets in excess of 3000MB/s in read speeds. anything short of 4x PCI E 3.0 lanes will bottleneck it.

 

[alucasa]

He probably did not like what you saw in the whole platform like you were disappointed.

I find Ryzen CPU very good but the platform it runs on is ... meh at the best which is holding me back from buying it.