Is Intel DC P3608 bootable in Linux?

Found a killer deal on a P3608. Saw the r/w speeds, amazing, ordered it immediately, figured it was thanks to the pcie x8 interface…

Well after doing some more reading, (after ordering it :man_facepalming:) apparently it’s mostly thanks to the fact that its actually two pools of NAND, with two controllers running in RAID0 to achieve the full capacity in a single drive. Well apparently this RAID0 configuration requires Intel RST enterprise driver to setup, and according to Intel documentation (maybe?) requires a xeon processor. Fantastic, I don’t have a xeon processor, but I’d really like to set it up as my main bootable drive for Linux as a single drive…

My system is a B450 based Ryzen system running Ubuntu 18.04LTS. I plan to run the drive in the main x16 slot, so straight off the CPU so physical link isn’t a problem. Intel documentation includes instructions for how to compile the linux kernel with the Intel NVME drivers included, is that the correct route? Or would I still need the RSTe software? Or should I look into AMDs raid software?

Anyone familiar with this drive? Or how to properly set it up as a boot drive?

I should specify that I’m only moderately comfortable with command line, I’m a biologist first and foremost. Be gentle with me :sweat_smile:
Worst case scenario I use it as a data drive rather than my boot drive. Or I guess I could resell it and get a cheap used DC P3500 instead, which is way less complicated. The goal was to have a larger, fast as hell, single drive rather than my collection of random SSD’s.

Edit: I guess I should mention this is for a workstation use case, handing lots of large files for next generation sequencing analysis.

Sorry to Necro a 6 month old thread but I have a similar question.

The the OP’s question, for an AMD board I am not sure but it will likely come down to the Motherboard and BIOS to enable you to boot from the card. The P3608 is an intel card that should show as two 800gb nvme x4 drives that will need to be raided to work. At the very least you could use it as two fast storage drives.

I am not a veteran with Linux boot but with USB boot loader keys or something you may be able to get it to work.

I Picked up a P3608 1.6tb drive recently for 200 bucks thinking this would be a poor man’s fast SSD. I have an Asus Prime X299 Deluxe (I not II) with an intel VROC key and a 7800X CPU.

I cannot get the drive to detect as a boot option under the Boot tab even though under the advanced CPU settings tab, I can view the raid 0 volume I have made and it says it is bootable: yes.

I have done everything the Asus manual suggests and can see the drive fine, (or even use it as data drives as I mentioned above) but no can boot from. I even tried to install Linux Mint and not luck seeing the drive to install to.

I am about to open a ticket with Asus to see if they can help. When you are in the BIOS a popup says that you will want the drivers “on the drive” before loading and that part is confusing not sure what they mean.

The X299 deluxe reserves PCI _x16 slot 2 for os at x4, and slot x16_4 at OS x8 but I cannot use slot 4 the bottom slot needs the full 44 lane i7 CPU, and I have the 28 lane.

Still, if I can see the volume in the BIOS and have it in the second slot, how do I get it to say I can boot from it?

I do think Motherboard BIOS is the first hurdle before you talk OS install. I may need Windows server to try or a server board as this is not a server board. It has RST but I do not think it has RSTe.

Thanks for any insights!

On my b450m pro4 under an older bios revision, the first x16 slot was able to be run as 4x4x4x4. I was able to raid it in Linux in disk management though I was booted off a different drive. I never attempted to boot off the raided P3608. In the latest bios the first x16 slot is now only able to be configured as x16 or x8x8. Not sure why that changed. Ultimately I shelved the drive and got a cheapo 2TB xpg nvme drive. The sustained performance isn’t amazing but it gets the job done. If you want a ton of high performance nvme storage I’d suggest going for a retired enterprise drive that is natively pcie 3.0 x8 rather than some weird raid amalgamation. Like the hgst sn150 or sn260 (I think that’s the model numbers) or the pcie x8 drives from Samsung.

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