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Four port M.2 RAID?

E

evilpaul

Limp Gawd
Joined
Dec 31, 2016
Messages
183
I realize it's not practical at the soon to be released 16GB/32GB Optane M.2 drive sizes, but are there any PCIe/NVMe four port RAID cards? I've seen tests with 3x Samsung 512GB drivers that were awesome, but impractical, and didn't scale past two drives really.
 
I've heard of expansion cards with 4, but not discrete RAID cards.

You doing database work, pro rendering, etc? If not and you're a typical gamer, you're not going to see full scaling from even a single fast NVME drive when compared to a single, quality, SATA III SSD for game load times and Windows boot times.

Yet it WOULD be a cool e-peen thing to own :jimlad:
 
The reason why you don't see decent drive scaling past two drives is because the DMI 2.0 / 3.0 bus of X99 and Z170 / Z270 limits their performance. As an example, 3x Samsung 960 Pros would easily saturate DMI 3.0 during read tests. You would see a benefit in write applications in most cases as the writes are slower and don't entirely saturate the link. Four drives almost certainly is a waste of time. There are however four slot RAID cards that can use an x16 PCIe bus. Dell makes one as does HP. These would be far less limiting but they require PCIe bifurcation support to function. Or at least, the Dell one does.
 
Dan_D said:
The reason why you don't see decent drive scaling past two drives is because the DMI 2.0 / 3.0 bus of X99 and Z170 / Z270 limits their performance. As an example, 3x Samsung 960 Pros would easily saturate DMI 3.0 during read tests. You would see a benefit in write applications in most cases as the writes are slower and don't entirely saturate the link. Four drives almost certainly is a waste of time. There are however four slot RAID cards that can use an x16 PCIe bus. Dell makes one as does HP. These would be far less limiting but they require PCIe bifurcation support to function. Or at least, the Dell one does.
Click to expand...
I lost the link to the 3x Samsung drives I was looking at, but that explains the results. Better writes with two drives and nada with the third.

I have no idea where it could be bought (and it doesn't look like there's hardware RAID support, or drivers?), but I found this one: http://www.ioi.com.tw/products/proddetail.aspx?CatID=106&DeviceID=3036&HostID=2067&ProdID=1060196 It looks like I'll have to wait a year or two to see largely pointless Optane client-load glory.
 
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