New X299 Taichi build

milanolens wrote: Hello ASRock, While looking for a new mobo the X299 Taichi caught my eye.   While this mobo can hold 3 M.2 SSD drivers, if I am correct only the bottom two can be used to set-up a raid array correct?   If so, Should I able to run below hardware at full speed? 1x  Intel Core i7-7820X 1x  Samsung 960 EVO - Boot disk OS 2x  Samsung 960 EVO in Raid 0 - Data 1x  Asus Radeon R9 390 OC STRIX 8GB   Regards, Milano

Given what we know about this new platform, the two lower M.2 slots are connected to the X299 chipset, while the upper M.2 slot uses the PCIe resources from the CPU. Since the standard Intel IRST RAID software works with the chipset (X299), and not the CPU, you are correct that only the lower two M.2 slots can be used with the IRST RAID software for a RAID 0 array of two 960 EVOs.

An i7-7820K has 28 PCIe 3.0 lanes. So you would be able to run a video card at the full PCIe 3.0 x16 interface. That leaves plenty (12) PCIe 3.0 lanes for the upper M.2 slot to run at PCIe 3.0 x4 for another 960 EVO.

What is new to the X299 platform is the VROC feature, Virtual RAID On CPU. VROC will be using Intel's other enterprise RAID software, RSTe, for VROC. IRST and RSTe are independent and cannot be combined or work together. We would need to use M.2 to PCIe adapter cards to use M.2 NMVe SSDs with VROC, but if the board has enough PCIe slots connected to the CPU, it may be possible to have a three drive RAID 0 array with VROC. But VROC requires an extra "key" device to enable full RSTe RAID support, which is an extra cost part. How VROC works remains to be seen.

Since Intel's Z170 and Z270 chipsets, we've had the capability to have three NVMe SSDs in RAID 0 using IRST software. The scaling of performance of multiple M.2 SSDs in RAID 0 is not perfect even with two SSDs, meaning speeds are not perfectly doubled. As is usually the case with RAID 0, we actually lose some of the 4K small file read speed. With a third SSD, the increase in performance was even less. IMO you are not missing much if anything using a two NVMe SSD RAID 0 array rather than three NVMe SSDs.

Another situation is the benchmark programs we usually use with SSDs may not be capable of truly showing us what the NVMe SSD RAID arrays are capable of. Result can be widely variable between benchmark programs. Also, the real world experience of these SSDs in RAID 0 is not a night and day experience in most cases, except for very large single file reads and writes.