I can do RAID on my Threadripper via the quad-NVME pcie adapters and the chipset bifurcation, but I’m doing RAID-0 for video editing performance and would prefer a controller that offers a little more resiliency (for example, a battery backup in the event of power loss, or something that’s not going to completely destroy the volume if a cached write never makes it to the array because the system locked up or hard-rebooted).
Any suggestions? My drives are eight 2280 m.2 gen 4 nvme’s so I’d likely need two cards that can handle four drives each.
Yes, except these are gen 3 and the Highpoint options don’t have a battery or supercapacitor. Cached writes can easily be lost without a battery and that could fubar your whole volume on raid-0.
Areca makes some decent m.2 nvme raid controllers. They’re all restricted to x8 gen 4, so you only ever be able to get 16GB/s, but you will enjoy increased random performance over using the CPU to aggregate IO operations.
They new “entry level” m.2 nvme raid adapters have super capacitors soldered directly on the cards so you don’t have to worry about finding a place to put the battery backup unit… however they don’t have any ram.
Thanks for this! Will check it out. Curious why they went with x8, that seems like a pretty big compromise on an otherwise enterprise product. But it’s still the most feature filled I’ve seen. Cheers.
If I had to bet, a raid SoC that could support gen4 x16 speeds didn’t exist when they designed it.
The broadcom 9670W and adaptec 3258p are actually full x16 gen4, but I’ve never seen one in person (don’t seem to be in the sales channels yet), plus they are super expensive, and they don’t mount m.2 as easily since you would have to use cables and daughter cards for m.2 on these two.