X299 and Storage Performance - VROC

Since the release of the X299 platform I've been on a mission to get VROC working. After a few months with the Gigabyte Auros Gaming 9, it was finally confirmed to be a no-go by various parties due to the PCI-E slot config of the board and lack of PCIE bifurcation support (no ASUS Hyper X16 card for you).

Moved on to the ASUS ROG Rampage VI Extreme. Lo and behold VROC works somewhat. Have been experimenting with a pair of Intel Optane drives and a few Samsung 960 SSDs connected via an ASUS Hyper-x16 card.. Note that I do not yet have a VROC key, but do have a standard key arriving in two days (Wednesday).

A few scenarios I've tested so far:

Two Optane 32GB SSDs in a bootable VROC RAID 0 array (OS volume) created in BIOS:
https://image.************/i11kXm/Optane_VROC_NOKEY.jpg

VS a single 32GB Optane drive as an OS drive:
https://image.************/eduiJR/Optane_Single_as_OS_Drive.jpg
Note the huge jump in 4k low queue depth performance. What I'm after for an OS volume.

VROC for the Samsung 960s is a no go for now, possibly due to the lack of a key.

A few other random benches:

Single Samsung 960 Pro:
https://image.************/mXfesm/Samsung960_Pro_Single.jpg

Two Samsung 960s in MS Soft RAID 0:
https://image.************/bU2EQ6/Samsung960_Pro_MSRAID.jpg

And last but not least a Samsung 850 Pro with Rapid mode enabled (RAM Caching):
https://image.************/kMfOJR/Samsung850_Rapid_Mode_Boot.jpg

Not sure where to go from here. Suggestions? Trying to get low queue depth performance for a boot drive, and max sequential read for storage.

IB sell everything and buy a few 900p drives.

That low queue depth 4k read speed on the single Optane is [H] af. Do you have boot time comparisons by chance?

devil22 said:

That low queue depth 4k read speed on the single Optane is [H] af. Do you have boot time comparisons by chance?

Click to expand...

No boot time numbers unfortunately. I can say booting from an install on a single Optane disk was noticeably faster than the other configs but we're talking a few seconds between configs.