X99 Chipset RAID 0 Benchmarks?

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sethk

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Hello,

I've been looking around for any information on RAID bandwidth testing on the new X99 chipset - in particular to see if it can exceed 1200MB/s. I need the speed for 4K video capture and transcoding, plus I will be building a VM box soon, so I'm interested in a fast caching solution as well. My plan is to use 4 to 6 850 Pro drives, and I'm hoping they can sustain 2000MB/s in RAID.

All data will be backed up to an external RAID 5 NAS box afterwards, so long term data integrity is of limited concern.

The reason why this X99 chipset RAID is particularly interesting is this chipset is different from both X79 (which only had 2 SATAIII ports) and Z8x / Z9x which are still bandwidth limited to about 1200MB/s. My understanding is this chipset has increased SATA bandwidth, and has 8 (10?) full speed native SATA III ports (unless you use M.2 or SATA Express).

Before anyone provides any theoretical information (such as just adding together throughput of SATA III drives), I'd appreciate it if information was based on actual benchmark results - either done yourself or linked to.

I did do some google searching and didn't find anything on the topic, but if your google-fu is strong, please post links. If I find something in the meanwhile, I will post as well -

TIA
 
I don't know if it exceeds 1200MB/s, but the x99 chipset only has 6 SATA ports that are raid capable. The extra 4 are AHCI only. This leads me to think it may not have a higher bandwidth connection to the CPU.
 
X99 is still based on DMI 2.0, which means the raw bandwidth between CPU and PCH is limited to 2 GB/s in each direction. There will be less than that usable for net SATA bandwidth. And it is shared with network and USB.

Your use case calls for a dedicated RAID controller.
 
Thanks for the info guys. The use cases are personal projects - i.e. it's coming out of my pocket. I have set up a few LSI based RAID 10 SSD arrays in a DAS box for work that meet the numbers I'm looking for here (that came to a 5 figure budget for storage, not counting the server cost), but I was hoping for a cheaper option since it's my wallet that will be groaning, and I don't need the same level of redundancy and production quality reliability (i.e. I'm OK with RAID 0 over RAID 10 or any other configuration).

The P3700 runs for $1400 for 400GB, and it still can't break 2000MB/s on write sustained (but it probably will be good enough). Not sure if the X99 will let you run RAID on two NVMe cards (although the budget would be too high for P3700, I'd probably do 2x P3500 if they scale for sequential writes in RAID 0).

Both Samsung and Sandforce are a little overdue for their NVMe solutions as well, I'm hoping that we see some market-making pricing from them.
 
X99 won't control the raid implementation of NVMe. I have toyed around with software raid of 2xP3700's in the lab I'm in using the intel NVMe driver, and you can certainly see the sequential benefits of spanning the two drives. The p3500's should be launching some time before the end of this calendar year and initial cost estimates are around $1.50/GB. P3600's are supposed to already be out as well but i'm not sure on those.
 
You could always get the Asrock extreme11 which has a builtin LSI controller. You'll get over 2GB/s easy in raid.
 
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