It’s finally here, folks: AMD has delivered on its promise to provide Ryzen Threadripper CPUs / X399 chipset with free NVMe RAID support. This new addition comes in the form of a driver update called RAIDXpert2. Do keep in mind however, that the driver is still in the beta phase, which means that it may still contain bugs and other “abnormalities.”
According to AMD, Ryzen Threadripper processors now come with three RAID level support: RAID0, RAID1, and RAID 10 – the latter requires four or six NVMe drives. For those who aren’t aware, NVMe SSDs are connected to one’s system via PCIe slots. This, of course, allows for more efficient and faster transfer speeds between the CPU and SSDs.
When it comes to performance, AMD claims that based on the company’s internal testing, its system was able to obtain “a monstrous 21.2GB/s from six disks in RAID0!” In addition, the company mentioned that scaling-wise, it was able to produce read and write scaling rates of 6.00X and 5.38X respectively.
Those aside, it’s worth noting that one will have to first make sure that their X3990-based motherboards are updated with the latest BIOS (subject to availability from respective manufacturers). Once this is done, one can then start to configure their RAID configuration using AMD’s RAIDXpert2 driver. More detailed instructions can be found here.
(Source: AMD)
