Storage port sharing SATA vs NVMe PCie

TanC wrote: I have an X99 WS workstation board. It is faulty and is being RMA'd. This board is no longer available. The X99 Gaming Professional I7 will work with Win 2012 R2 (With some hacking on the I218V lan port). I have 9 Spinner HDDs (Mix of 8 and 6TB drives) The boot drive is a 950 Pro 512GB I have 1 optical drive (Which I'm soon going to replace with another 8TB drive as I don't reall need optical anymore - I have an external drive if really need). Question: The X99 WS M.2 port does not share Sata ports. So I can use all 10 sata ports PLUS the M.2 drive without issues. On the I7 specifications it says.. 10 x SATA3 6.0Gb/s Connectors, support RAID (RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 5, RAID 10, Intel Rapid Storage Technology 13), NCQ, AHCI, Hot Plug * SSATA3_3 connector is shared with the M2_1; SSATA3_2 connector is shared with the M2_2 * RAID is supported on SATA3_0 ~ SATA3_5 ports only. The conflict mentioned for the M.2 slots - Does that only apply to Sata M.2 drives, or does it apply to the 950 Pro NVMe drive as well. If I put another 950 pro 512 in the other M.2 slot, given it says nothing about RAID support for M.2 slots, can I RAID the two M.2 drives? If the Gaming I7 will conflict with SATA and NVMe drives, that means I will loose HDD storage. In this case, is there another X99 2011-3 motherboard that supports an I7-6850K CPU with dual LAN (Capable of teaming)?

First you are mistaken about the X99 WS board not sharing an Intel SATA III port with its M.2 slot. From the X99 WS specifications:

S_SATA3_3 connector is shared with the eSATA port, S_SATA3_2 connector is shared with Ultra M.2 Socket

(Sorry, the forum link tool fails on URL's that contain a '?')

http://www.asrock.com/mb/Intel/X99%20WS/?cat=Specifications

That is not important, but what is important is the sharing of SATA III ports with the M.2 slots on ASRock X99 boards only applies to the use of M.2 SATA SSDs in the M.2 slot(s).

So the Fatal1ty X99 Professional Gaming i7's M.2 slots can be used with M.2 NVMe SSDs like a 950 Pro, without any loss of the Intel SATA III ports.

The technical details about this are simply that any SATA drives use the X99 chipset resources (DMI2/PCIe 2.0) for both standard SATA and M.2 SATA drives. M.2 NVMe SSDs use the processor's PCIe 3.0 lanes, leaving all the SATA ports available. The X99 chipset resources cannot supply the full bandwidth requirements of PCIe 3.0 x4 of NMVe SSDs like a 950 Pro.

The X99 platform does not provide Intel's IRST RAID support for NVMe SSDs. That is because the IRST software only works with the chipset resources on any Intel system.

The newer Intel 100 and 200 series chipsets that support RAID have DMI3/PCIe 3.0 support in the chipset. The Ultra M.2 slots on those boards are connected to the chipset resources, and with some magic in the newer versions of the IRST software (called PCIe remapping), they support RAID for NVMe SSDs. The newer Intel X299 platform has the new VROC RAID that provides RAID support for NVMe SSDs connected to the processor's PCIe 3.0 lanes, using updated Intel RSTe RAID software. That does not apply to X99 systems.

You can use Windows software RAID with two NVMe SSDs on X99 boards, but those RAID arrays cannot be used as the OS drive, they are not bootable.

A question for you, have you used Server 2012 R2 with an NVMe SSD? Does Server 2012 R2 have a native NVMe driver? Or have you managed to install the Samsung NVMe driver on 2012 R2?

TanC wrote: Hi, thanks for your reply. Well, that's embarrassing. Read something quickly and you make mistakes.... I saw "Ultra M.2" and read it as "U2" and breathed a sigh of relief. Silly me :) Thanks for the explanation. Most helpful. I haven't had RAID up to now... It was on my wish list, but I guess I'll need X299 to accomplish that. I have no budget for that so I guess I'll stay where I am. Yes, Win 2012R2 does have and works with the native NVMe driver. The advice I've seen though is don't use the native driver. Attempting to install the Samsung Driver package fails. The only way to install it was to extract the driver files and manually install. A quick check in device manager shows it's now using the Samsung driver. Thanks for your help. Tanya

Glad I could help you. The information about 2012R2's NVMe driver is useful to me. We have a person trying to use an NVMe SSD with Server 2011, which does not have a native MSoft NVMe driver. It's good news for that person potentially that you can install the actual Samsung NVMe driver files via a Device Manager update in 2012R2. But if Server 2011 is more like Vista, I am not confident it will work.

Users of the MSoft stornvme and the Samsung NVMe drivers with Samsung OEM SSDs like the SM961 and PM961 have argued about the good and bad results they have gotten with each one. The Samsung 2.2 NVMe driver fixed an issue, but there are some users that will only use stornvme, so who knows?

It did work, using the Samsung NVMe driver files extracted from their Windows installation NVMe driver package. They installed it via Device Manager, and working fine. I don't know yet if they plan on using it for the OS drive, which may need to be done as you described.