AMD Threadripper RAID in 2024! Is it okay?

for today's video it's going to be pretty short and sweet we're going to take this obtaine drive and we're going to install it in an AMD system a lot of you already know this is possible but for some reason some of you think because this is Intel technology that you can't mix Intel and AMD technology it's like mixing Fire and Ice or oil and water but that couldn't be further from the truth let's take a look let's [Music] discuss getting a single opan Drive working on an AMD platform is pretty easy it's basically plug-and play you can use an adapter cable like this or you can use a pcie addin card uh PCI add-in card I would really only recommend if you're going to go with a thread Ripper platform I'm demonstrating this on a thread Ripper platform but this would work just as well on an am4 or am5 platform at least when we're talking about one or two optained devices if you're going to add like four or or six or eight uh you're going to want more pcie Lanes which you're going to be relegated to thread Ripper for that this also applies not just to optane but also any kind of Enterprise u.2 storage because u.2 is basically nvme it's pcie and because it's just PCI you just got to get the lanes from the connector on the drive to the motherboard somehow they can be a pcie addin c that goes from pcie to oculink or pcie to mcio as I recently demonstrated or PCI to some other connector and then some other connector to your u.2 interface heck you may be able to get u3 on eBay really cheap something like that the other piece of advice I would give you is that when you're looking for these kinds of cables so like this Intel cable it's low profile Intel used to sell these for $25 um if it didn't come bundled with a drive a lot of the time it would come bundled with a drive but what is being sold now doesn't come bundled with these cables this is only capable of gen 3 PCI Express there's gen 3 Gen 4 and now even Gen 5 cables like this the Gen 4 and the Gen 5 cables are breathtakingly more expensive so I don't even know if you can get these for about 25 bucks anymore it seems like it's going to be a little bit more pricey than that an alternative could be something from IC do we've reviewed IC do stuff in the past um depending on what sort of situation that you're facing you may have to come to the level one forums for a little bit of of tech support and help but using these u.2 drives on any modern platform you know an am4 am5 amd's platform Intel's platform obviously doesn't really matter this will work because it's just PCI Express it's just a matter of getting it into the motherboard even if you don't have an m.2 slot you can use a PCA card like this one this takes X4 this actually does have a redriver on it because this is actually a Gen 4 capable card but you can go out into this is more optain but this is a p5800 x so there are Gen 4 obtains that will absolutely saturate the four Gen 4 links this obtain is even lower latency well slightly that's just because of the controller and software improvements not the media but also it's Gen 4 which means that it'll saturate Gen 4 speeds you can get 8 gbes per second off of this one drive so a raid zero of these drives oh that's pretty nice but even I'm not crazy enough to have bought 3 terb of p5800 X level opan but I am crazy enough to have bought several of these off of Newegg and in fact I've actually bought several more of these for other YouTubers and other other folks in my circle because $400 for storage like this really is a good deal the benefit of optane is that it has very very uh low IO latency and what that means is single block requests I recently did another video where I talked a little bit about IO latency most of the time when you're just using your computer interactively the io pattern is unpredictable and so when you are using a program it's asking for basically one or two blocks at a time um from storage and the contents of those blocks determine the next blocks that you're going to need to request and so really the the bottleneck the thing that dominates that equation is the round trip time from software execution to the drive and then the drive Returns the data and then the software says okay I need that the next thing and so the processing time to process the data is minuscule it's almost instantaneous but the time that it takes the drive to look up and return that record is the thing that takes forever and this is about twice as fast as this or I should say the latency of this is about half nand flash even for old gen one optained devices and gen Nan optain devices 1.5 tabes about $400 right now on NewEgg that is a heck of a deal for what the underlying technology is especially as we enter 2024 and the the a lot of analysts are predicting a storage apocalypse for a nand because the production rate for nand has been down for so long that the price can't help but go way way up like 50% up 100% up maybe something like that and again $400 for 1.5 ter byes it doesn't seem like a good deal if you're just looking at it for the raw capacity but it has dramatically much higher wear endurance and dramatically lower latency depending on what you're doing you may feel a huge difference in latency for everything that I do you know I sort of have to live on a computer like 10 hours a day just doing Goof Off stuff like this and also real work and everything else and uh it I can it makes a big difference for for what I do anyway using opan on AMD it works just as well on Intel there's minor Aster there as it does on any other platform because it's just a pcie device so once you've got the device adapted you can come over to your interface I would say it's also only necessary to use this if you're going to do it on a boot volume because you can just do it through the guey like you can install the drivers in Windows and set up your raid volume through the guey if it's not your boot volume if it's your boot volume we got to go through all this to set it up and then set up our Windows USB so we begin our quest to install Windows on a raid volume by creating a Windows USB I'm assuming that you don't need to know how to do that there are other guides for that Windows USB we're going to reinsert the windows USB now you're going to have to go to the page for your motherboard and go to support and download and there's two downloads that we need one is called rate expert utility version blah blah blah and inside it is the guide PDF and the guide PDF is actually quite good very well done AMD this has everything you need to know now it talks about copying something out of here that is the raid driver azrock doesn't package that in this ZIP file I think they probably should H buy wind rare not on this machine this machine's going to get nuked strangely aot calls it the SATA floppy image but the clue is in the version 9.3.2 point2 55 hey that's the same as the rate expert utility yeah exactly it doesn't have anything to do with like just don't worry about it say to Floppy it's a terrible name but inside there there's nvme and then you got three drivers bottom config and raid when we go into the windows installer we're going to have to install these well at least two two out of the three of these in order to get the volume to be detected after we create the array in BIOS so what we do is this nvme we extract to our Windows installer our installer USB so that this folder exists in the root of the USB once that's done you're going to take that USB stick and go to the computer that you're going to install which is I'm going to switch inputs here the Fancy Pants level one text KVM and then we'll be at a raw motherboard with just two empty obtaine drives but one second so for amd's platform the AMD raid solution that AMD offers is a little behind uh vrock what Intel offers with vrock fortunately vck requires a license to use whereas AMD raate expert doesn't so it's at least got that going for it the other thing that's weird is AMD is not keeping a super close eye on board Partners so you don't always have a way to actually configure raid beyond the basics in fact I still wouldn't recommend amd's raid expert 2 for anything more complicated than a raid one mirroring your your Os or boot drive or a RAID 10 for Speed you do mirroring or if you really just want to go fast you could do a raid zero but there's a lot of caveats there it's kind of a two-step process you'll have to go into storage configuration and in vme RAID Mode and enable that then you have to save an exit and then come back into the BIOS again when you do that in your main menu you should have a new option called rate expert 2 Configuration utility this will give you options to do controller management you can view the controller and you can rescan discs and see what's going on with that you can do physical dis management to view phys physical disc properties and confirm yes 1.5 tabt now I should have two physical 905 PS in there I'm going to live very dangerously and set up a rate zero and that is because this system is backed up like every hour so it'll be fine okay with both of our p905 obtained 1.5 TB drives connected you go to the raid expert 2 utility make sure that we see two nvme controllers two physical discs physical disc operations Select Physical disc they're both there it looks good you want to unplug any storage in the system that you're not going to use in the array if there is any storage and even though this is not part of an array and these are brand new drives um it wants us to delete the fact that they are Standalone so now I can go to create array and so you can create AR raid zero raid one or volume so volume is a single dis or concatenation of discs meaning that when it fills one up it'll just go to the next one we're going to do raate Zero by default the mediat type will show you both the hard drives ssds and hard drives and raid expert you shouldn't be booting off of a hard drive and so you shouldn't be using this technology for um raiding a bootable array and because you're not rating a bootable array you shouldn't be doing it from bios you can do this from inside windows way more cleanly way more easily and way more reliably and so that's what I say when AMD is not keeping an eye on some of their board Partners some of their board Partners don't expose this interface in the Bios and so it's very hard to set up a bootable volume you can actually do it you can create the bootable volume on another board and then bring the drives over as long as rate expert 2 is enabled and as long as the boards are relatively recently the same BIOS version like you're not going to be able to do this on like a b450 motherboard but even x570 motherboards with the latest bios you could create the raid volume there and bring it over and generally that will work I've not had that be 100% reliable because I don't think a lot of people are using this and so I don't think AMD really tests this super heavy heavily but as we enter the era of you know amds basically taking over the universe in the workstation space this is what we have right now so we're going to try to use it doesn't mean there's not room for improvement I know I got to consults we can see that our array size here is 2.9 th000 megabytes or 2.9 gigabytes which is about what we expect 256k cash tag size which is probably fine I usually like to make that match the uh like the underlying Hardware cell size and I think on the p905 it's 256 kilobytes so I have some database servers that run the p4800x obtaine it's insanely fast and those are configured for 256 kilobyte sector sizes so it's sort of an interesting situation so that's why I've set it to 256 kilobytes that makes sense for this kind of storage I think maybe I forgot to hit save ah total logical array count zero I didn't get something exactly right when I was showing you what to do let's go to array management create array raid level raid zero Select Physical discs yep apply changes ex good create array array one total logical array count one must have just forgot to hit save happens to the best of us let's save and exit let's preemptively go back into BIOS one more time and just double check logical array count one that's what we want to see all right so our initial setup shows the drive separately sometimes they don't show up at all uh you're not in a good spot right now it's like wait a minute I can see the drives individually yeah not fabulous so we want to pick the RC raid driver first no want to go to the folder that we made it earlier there three drivers in here basically we'll start with the bottom the bottom device enables the other device drivers to also be installed so next we do the raid driver and now we see Drive zero unallocated space 2.7 terabytes looks nice all right so we can just do next from here that's going to copy the windows files and get them ready for the installation and pretty soon we'll be booted into Windows that's going pretty fast even though these are gen 3 drives two gen 3 by your powers combined Gen 4 throughput but with uh half the latency of normal well I don't know how much latency we're going to lose with the raid expert driver overhead but we're going to find out that was kind of fast now have to install a bunch of crap so when I set up a new machine I like to use wind get or chocy it's kind of a Windows package management system if you're not familiar with the term package management system on Windows imagine that you could just open up a terminal window and just say hey go get Chrome Firefox steam VLC uh when R 7zip whatever you just give it a list of programs and we just go do it and there's no BS and it gets it done that's package manager we did videos on that check those out wind get is kind of there kind of not like Microsoft's in sort of a weird spot some bad people figured out how to use the the app install or protocol to install malware because it bypasses some checks because of course it does but also like the people at Microsoft do things that don't make any sense and I've pointed this out before but I'm going to keep pointing it out because it's just it's it's easy to see the the cracks in the Microsoft Empire when you actually have to use these things it's so like I search app installer and all of these people have gamed the thing mobile app installer W USA Tools apk installer okay I guess APK installer like is a thing people are looking for but like none of these are real and some of them say official Like official whatever I saw that earlier it's like here's the Microsoft 365 office installed okay said three out of five stars because it's some FY un bargain from Microsoft trying to actually use it because yeah Windows app Studio installer is this this is actually from Microsoft Corporation this is probably not actually what I need use your this use your webcam accesses okay that's probably not what I need and then Edge does that which is annoying and dumb so use the wind tool to manage install applications and it's like you can get the app installer from the Microsoft store app installer isn't that what I just search for I literally just search for app installer and app installer when you are in the Microsoft store and you go to search for app installer guess what's not there like does anybody at Microsoft no one at Microsoft is literally using their own product am I the one taking crazy bills here there it is also with slightly more than three stars how are you the operating system company on Earth and making mistakes this bad like really actually I guess Linux is probably the the largest operating system on Earth the only place that hasn't completely taken over the universe is desktop and I suspect that's because of sleeper agents making the desktop experience secretly worse no no no no no no like who thought that was a good idea also the start menu while I'm at it again complain about the start menu in the past I've clicked on this what's here Edge solitire LinkedIn recommended app as it's like okay there's the studio installer which is was recently added but was not at all not at all a valid result for searching for app installer uh WhatsApp Spotify Xbox to do this is basically all trash uh let's search for touchcreen controls hey calibrate the screen for pan or touch input that's going to disappear in the next Windows update see right now I can change it I get this little popup which is actually from Windows 8 for the touch interface soon as we do Windows update and reboot that's going to be gone hey wind get is there finally unfortunately wind get is still not sophisticated enough to uh take more than one program that you want at a time which is just again how is Microsoft so bad at this another thing you may be asking yourself is wait is is he installing stuff from the command line and in the background at the same time it's like yes because Windows as an operating system is so broken there's not a facility for saying hey I'm installing applications right now don't actually install more applications another different way the way that you would have an a package manager in virtually any Linux drro of the last two decades oh you can install a program via a shell script while you're also using the package manager that's perfectly fine that's kind of what I'm doing on Linux see that was a little bit that was kind of bait cuz could I do a for each Powershell Loop to just run through wind get for a list of applications yes but that is not as easy nor as sane as wind get install program pram 1 program two program 3 Program 4 the way that it should be damn apologist now one thing we're going to have to do manually because we only added the bottom driver and the raid driver there's also a third driver raid config driver you can add it during the installer the driver installer will also add it but it didn't for some reason on this I'm going to do browse and I'm going to go to our installation I'm going to go back in and it's RC config I'm just going to hit open there and there and it's like hey I know what this is this showed up under other devices and so I just H found have driver blah blah blah now I can run the raate expert utility says please run this application as administrator but it can see the two discs in here and you can see the raid array and you can see the status and and if there's a problem with it and so on and so forth let on crystal disar your sequential reads on a raate zway not fabulous with the default Crystal dismark settings now performance here R&D 4K q1 T1 this is very good this is especially very good for an AMD system not bad let's do real world performance and see how that does again the results are very very good for an nvme SSD so real world performance profile on Crystal dismark and Crystal dismark is not the end all be all for benchmarks but the read speed and the right speed they could be a little bit better like on Linux MD if this is a Linux workstation you can get a better result from your read speed just something about raid expert or Raid expert is not doing a uh you know a deep enough read or something like that but this is technically Q depth one keep in mind that the underlying drives there's more than one drive so Q depth one with two underlying drives mean that it is actually getting correctly cued across two physical discs so this is good AMD has made improvements and progress in this driver over the last year random 4K again QEP 1 206 megabytes per second that is a very impressive result especially taking into account that your random 4K uh read time is 19 microc seconds this is a very very good result just keep in mind that the underlying architecture here it's opt so it's insanely fast and once you get the raid driver installed you're Off to the Races and everything works great now I've shown you that optain works on amd's platform even in a raid configuration but if you're going to use it not in AR raid configuration just as a standalone drive it's just plug-and play all you got to worry about is cabling either using an m.2 adapter or if you Splash out for the Gen 4 stuff using a pcie drive like this or you can do Enterprise drives like a kokia cd6 this is is also a Gen 4 drive now these drives are not super amazing just for pure client workloads but if you're constantly shuffling around uh lots of compressed archives and uncompressing them like if you've got a whole Farm of VMS and virtual machine archives and you're constantly compressing and decompressing uh virtual machine archive files and they're 200 gigabytes at a time something like this will beat the pants off of pretty much any other drive that you would buy for your workstation um they're not tuned for the lowest latency they're not tuned for the highest throughput consumer drives will generally outperform them for maximum performance at throughput and uh minimum latencies but a drive like a cd6 as a Workhorse Drive dealing with lots and lots of data shuffling a couple of hundred gigs at a time it's basically indispensable and you can use the same kind of approach these other Enterprise class drives it's just obtains sort of in a unique position the p905 is a 1.5 terabytes the only reason we're seeing those is because Intel has tons and tons of nanded storage and uh they're coming out in consumer drives instead of Enterprise drives because this is the older generation of nand Intel still has second generation nand which is insanely way faster but that doesn't mean that first generation nand is not also insanely way fast it also doesn't mean that you have to have an Intel platform to use optane it works pretty well here even under the uh AMD Ray which can be a little bit of a handicap when we're talking about latency and maximum throughput as being additive if you're on Linux it'll work just as well you don't need to enable the RAID drivers or anything you just use Linux MD you don't fool with AMD raid expert stuff at all on the Linux side this is just the windows stuff so I'm W this is level one signing out and you can find me in the level one forums if you have any questions or I missed anything or anything is unclear all right signing out and I'll see you [Music] there for

Channel: Level1Techs

Views: 37,487

Keywords: technology, science, design, ux, computers, hardware, software, programming, level1, l1, level one

Id: xPLedb19E54

Length: 26min 10sec (1570 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 25 2024