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Dramatic improvements in bootable drives have arrived


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  • Advanced Member

 

 A couple weeks ago I became aware of M2 drives which have their own bus to the CPU.

 

Here's a 2TB Samsung model you can get for around $1200

PCI Express 3.0 M.2 interface
Read / write transfer rates: 3500MB/s / 2100MB/s

samsung_mz_v6p2t0bw_2tb_960_pro_m_2_1475

 

Then I was over at WCCF looking at their computer builder app and saw that they had this matched with this motherboard which is exclusively built for the 16 core AMD Threadripper;

https://www.amazon.com/ROG-ZENITH-EXTREME-Threadripper-Motherboard/dp/B0748K1F99

It takes up to three of these 2 TB drives

 

Powered by AMD Ryzen Threadripper TR4 processors to maximize connectivity and speed with support for up to 128GB of DDR4 memory, three (3) NVMe M.2 drives, front side U.2 and front panel USB 3.1 Gen2 port

Connect With Unparalleled Speed
ROG Zenith Extreme's DIMM.2 module is a bundled expansion card that allows two M.2 drives to be connected via a DDR4 interface. It is also equipped with an M.2 heatsink integrated into the PCH heatsink. With a huge cooling surface, the heatsink perfectly chills an inserted M.2 SSD.

 

3199c7ee-fc7c-4d30-b00a-7f55e2a4c281.jpg

 

Question: Can this board take 2 samsung 960 pro m.2 ssds? i cant tell from the photos? wanting to run them in raid 0 for the operating system and games
Answer: Can use 3 M.2 natively. NVME RAID boot will be supported in upcoming BIOS update (Fall17). 
By GoodwinAJ on September 2, 2017

 

Now I don't pretend to be any expert on computers. I'm an artist who loves computers, not a computer guy. 

 

But this piqued my curiosity; NVME RAID boot? what the hell is that?

 

So I went looking and found this;

" Serial ATA and Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) offer plenty of bandwidth for hard drives, but for increasingly speedy SSDs, they’ve run out of steam.

Because of SATA’s 600Gbps ceiling, just about any top-flight SATA SSD will score the same in our testing these days—around 500MBps. Even 12GBps SAS SSD performance stalls at around 1.5GBps. SSD technology is capable of much more.

The industry knew this impasse was coming from the get-go. SSDs have far more in common with fast system memory than with the slow hard drives they emulate. It was simply more convenient to use the existing PC storage infrastructure, putting SSDs on relatively slow (compared to memory) SATA and SAS. For a long time this was fine, as it took a while for SSDs to ramp up in speed. Those days are long gone."

 

https://www.techpowerup.com/236644/amd-to-enable-nvme-raid-on-x399-threadripper-platform

 

When AMD Ryzen Threadripper HEDT platform launched earlier this year, a shortcoming was its lack of NVMe RAID support. While you could build soft-RAID arrays using NVMe drives, you couldn't boot from them. AMD is addressing this, by adding support for NVMe RAID through a software update, scheduled for 25th September. This software update is in the form of both a driver update (including a lightweight F6-install driver), and a motherboard BIOS update, letting AMD X399 chipset motherboards boot from RAID 0, RAID 1, and RAID 10 arrays made up of up to ten NVMe drives. AMD confirmed that it has no plans to bring NVMe RAID support for the X370 or B350 platforms.

32tbnvmessd2-100577100-large.jpg

 

 

Leveraging existing technology

Fortunately, a suitable high-bandwidth bus technology was already in place—PCI Express, or PCIe. PCIe is the underlying data transport layer for graphics and other add-in cards, as well as Thunderbolt. (Gen 2) offers approximately 500MBps per lane, and version 3.x (Gen 3), around 985MBps per lane. Put a card in a x4 (four-lane) slot and you’ve got 2GBps of bandwidth with Gen 2 and nearly 4GBps with Gen 3. That’s a vast improvement, and in the latter case, a wide enough pipe for today’s fastest SSDs.

PCIe expansion card solutions such as OCZ’s RevoDrive, Kingston’s Hyperx Predator M.2/PCIe, Plextor’s M6e and others have been available for some time now, but to date, they have relied on the SCSI or SATA protocols with their straight-line hard drive methodologies. Obviously, a new approach was required. 

 

intel-ssd-750-series-half-height-half-le

 

One of the best things about NVM Express is that you don’t have to worry about drivers showing up. Linux has had NVMe support since kernel 3.1; Windows 8.1 and Server 2012 R2 both include a native driver, and there’s a FreeBSD driver in the works. When Apple decides to support NVMe, the latter should make it easy to port.

However, BIOS support is largely lacking. Without an NVMe-aware BIOS, you can’t boot from an NVMe drive, though anyone with a x4 PCIe slot or M.2 connector can benefit from employing an NVMe drive as secondary storage. An NVMe BIOS is not a difficult technical hurdle, but it does require engineering hours and money, so it’s unlikely it will stretch far back into the legacy pool. 

Equally daunting for early adopters is the connection conundrum. Early on, you’ll see a lot of expansion card NVMe drives using Gen 3 PCIe slots. That's because all 2.5-inch NVMe SSDs use the new SFF-8639 (Small Form Factor) connector that’s been specially developed for NVMe and SATA Express, but is currently found only on high-end servers. An SFF-8639 connection features four Gen 3 PCIe lanes, two SATA ports, plus sideband channels and both 3.3-volt and 12-volt power.

There are adapters and cables that allow you to connect 2.5-inch NVMe SSDs to M.2, but as M.2 lacks a 12-volt rail, the adapters draw juice from a standard SATA power connector. The real issue with M.2 is that on Intel systems it's generally implemented behind the PCH (Platform Controller Hub), which features only Gen 2 PCIe. That's because the PCH lies behind the DMI (Direct Media Interface) which is capped at 2GBps. You can see the problem.

Note that NVMe via M.2 isn’t 3.3 times faster than SATA. But if you pay the money, you’re going to want your SSD to be all it can be. At least I would. That means an expansion card drive until SFF-8639 connectors show up on consumer PCs.

 

NVMe SSDs actually showed up last summer with Samsung’s 1.6TB MZ-WEIT10, which shipped in Dell’s $10,000 PowerEdge R920 server. Gulp. Intel followed suit with the announcement of its pricy PS3600 and 3700 series NVMe SSDs, which are available in capacities up to 2TB. The first consumer NVMe drive to show up is Intel’s 750. It’s fast. Read our review.

The Current Outlook

Enthusiasts will want to take a hard look at Intel’s 750. Most recent high-end motherboards will get firmware upgrades to support NVMe so you can boot from the drive. Most legacy mainstream boards will probably not. But our talks with Intel and other vendors indicate that the flood gates have opened, and you should see a torrent of NVMe support later in the year. 

 

 

 

 

I'm sure there's people on this board that know more about this than me, maybe some of you have already implemented this technology and if you have please post your experience or knowledge here; I'd welcome it and I'm sure the other 3d coat enthusiasts here that are planning new rigs would welcome it too.

 

:)

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  • Advanced Member

A friend of mine has one and said he cold boots Windows 10 under 2.5 secs with the M.2.. <- It's on my wishlist for my next rig.

The same specs but 512GB is $360.00 CDN ($282.00 USD), all apps on C:, rest on regular 1 TB SSDs D: and I'm in business!

He did mention you needed to have a 4x lane to get the full speeds.

Edited by Nossgrr
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