Swithing from software RAID to motherboard RAID for NVMe drives on the ASRock TRX40 Creator

[Mannekino]

I will be receiving a system soon where I’m tasked to do maintenance, upgrades and some improvements. It has a ASRock TRX40 Creator paired with a Ryzen Threadripper 3970X. The current OS is Debian 11 and the owner has configured two Seagate FireCuda 520 2TB SDDs in a stripe set using mdadm. The storage will be upgraded to two FireCuda 530 4TB SSDs.

I’ve done some searching and found that this board should support RAID 0 for NVMe SSDs on the motherboard. According to the driver page for the TRX40 chipset there are drivers available for Windows, RHEL and Ubuntu for motherboard RAID.

Are there any benefits to switch from software RAID to motherboard RAID?

If so, is there a filesystem that should be used for optimal performance and/or stability?

[twin_savage]

Taken from another recent thread:

@twin_savage

@s-m-e

There is a really interesting article published by Puget Systems on this topic. One of very few at this level of detail that I could actually find. It’s based on Windows, not Linux as in my case, but nonetheless absolutely worth a read. Bottom line: NVMe RAID 0 via the OS level is surprisingly good under most circumstances (acknowledging that you have to budget in CPU cycles for it when doing calculations at the same time).

As I understand it, the Highpoint SSD7101A-1 is just a pcie switch and not an actual raid controller. Meaning it is just using some kind of special sauce software raid implementation when benchmarked as “HighPoint RAID”. VROC and the “Windows RAID” are also software raid.

This is the only mention of hardware nvme raid versus software nvme raid I could find:
Linux mdadm software RAID vs Broadcom MegaRAID 9560

Looks like a 30-50% performance improvement depending on queue depth when going from software raid to hardware raid, I’d imagine the performance delta between one generation newer hardware to be even greater, raid cards are improving at a faster rate than CPUs.

Bottom line is there isn’t much performance difference between OS managed software raid and motherboard raid (which is also effectively software raid). I’d take mdadm managing my raid over the motherboard, at least I know mdadm is portable between system is something goes very wrong… not sure if I’d trust a motherboard raid to be that portable.