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PCIe SSD

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(@dougbitt)
Posts: 48
Member
Topic starter
 

I'm looking to install PCIe SSD blades.
Can SR format NVMe SSD's to be bootable?
What would you suggest for a setup?

 
Posted : 07/04/2017 8:18 am
(@softraid-support)
Posts: 8006
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SoftRAID does not care about drives, or the bus. The only requirement is that the devices are reliable with Mac OS.

If your PCIe card supports booting, then SoftRAID can create a bootable volume.

With SSD's create a RAID 4 volume.

 
Posted : 07/04/2017 12:09 pm
(@dougbitt)
Posts: 48
Member
Topic starter
 

Thanks for the info.

For the NVMe, it requires a driver to communicate with the mac and from my understanding will not boot because the driver needs to load after it boots & prior to the MVMe starts. Would softraid over ride the need for drivers & boot from the SSD blade?

 
Posted : 07/04/2017 1:52 pm
(@softraid-support)
Posts: 8006
Member Admin
 

I would have to check with engineering, but I am going to say no. SoftRAID is just a disk driver and unless a disk technology (bus in this case) is bootable, SoftRAID will have no impact on that either way.

 
Posted : 09/04/2017 12:37 am
(@dougbitt)
Posts: 48
Member
Topic starter
 

SoftRAID does not care about drives, or the bus. The only requirement is that the devices are reliable with Mac OS.

If your PCIe card supports booting, then SoftRAID can create a bootable volume.

With SSD's create a RAID 4 volume.

Due to space constraints & the expense of the PCIe SSD blade, would a 1+0 configuration be just as fast with the security of the 1+ and give more storage, instead of a RAID 4 ?

 
Posted : 12/04/2017 10:09 pm
(@softraid-support)
Posts: 8006
Member Admin
 

RAID 1+0 should be fast with SSD's. RAID 4 will be faster, but perhaps the 1+0 fast enough for your purposes. RAID 1+0 is more redundant also, so yields higher data availability

 
Posted : 13/04/2017 4:04 am
(@dougbitt)
Posts: 48
Member
Topic starter
 

So I finally got my 3 480gb NVMe drives set up as 2-raid 4 partitions
and noticed a decrease in speed from single Raid 4 partition. Why does splitting the drive into multiple partitions add that much overhead to noticeably slow it down?

Would you go back to a single partition?

 
Posted : 18/02/2019 1:13 pm
(@softraid-support)
Posts: 8006
Member Admin
 

I performed the following test:
Created a 3 disk RAID 4 (1TB) volume on the M2/4 Express

Then created two 3 disk RAID 4 volumes (500GB each)

Ran AJA Sytem test on all volumes.

As expected, there was no difference in performance.
(~825MB/s writes, 1500MB/s Reads)

 
Posted : 18/02/2019 2:00 pm
(@dougbitt)
Posts: 48
Member
Topic starter
 

Thank you, then it must have something to do the system accessing from multiple partitions.

 
Posted : 19/02/2019 7:30 am
(@softraid-support)
Posts: 8006
Member Admin
 

On an SSD volume, there should be no difference on accessing different parts of the SSD. There is nothing rotating. The partitioning does not make a difference.

What are you using for a benchmark?

 
Posted : 19/02/2019 10:59 am
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