Hello. I was wondering if anyone had any help they could give with trying to put together storage for a WRX90 chipset system. We’re looking at Supermicro or HP Z2 machines and have everything except for fast, reliable, redundant storage figured out.
Is there a way to get something like a U.2 P5800x connected up with a Threadripper system in either Raid 1 or 10? I know this Optane drive is no longer produced but something like it is what we’re shooting for. High read/write and IOPS but it’s U.2 and not easy to hookup.
Can someone give us some guidance in either add in cards or drive bay adapters/cables that we can use? Maybe a different interface would work better like E1.S ?
The system is going to be used for a high performance server for our accounting database file. The OS will likely be on a Raid 1 M.2 setup and this additional storage would carry the database.
The P5800X is definitely still in a class of it’s own when it comes to DB performance compared to any NAND drive.
There are plenty of “dumb” PCIe slot > multi U.2 adapter cards that simply required slot bifurcation, but the issue I’d be more concerned about is how to logically implement a raid array with them.
If your OS is going to be Windows, there aren’t many good options to get a software raid out of the P5800X’s; VROC (which isn’t exactly a software raid) is about the only one I’d recommend if your on Windows but its an Intel only technology.
Also, consider if a raid is even strictly necessary in your application. Most db engines can use a list of individual devices. No need to pay the RAID performance penalty?
Thank you all for the responses. I truly appreciate the help.
I’m not beholden to an array but I still don’t have a good answer for how to reliably get something like a U.2 interface onto the PCIe bus. I’ve seen adapters for such a thing but I don’t really have much trust in the quality of them.
Is there a way to do this? If I could get 1 quality drive like the P5800x into the system then I would even do that if the adapter was something we could rely on.
Thank you again.
So far the only U.2 adapter I’d actually bet money on working correctly with PCIe 4.0 or 5.0 are the ones from serialcables; the rest of them all seem to be Chinese or rebrands of Chinese adapters.
