Remember back in August when AMD launched its entry-level flagship processor the Ryzen Threadripper 1900X? This particular piece of hardware features 8 to 16 cores and also featuring the SenseMI technology and Zen "Core" Architecture being priced $549. At that time AMD made a promise that it would launch new drivers to complement the X399 chipset which would enable support for NVMe RAID.
Now originally it was thought that AMD would make the driver available on September 25th, well they have come close to the actual date of delivery by making the driver readily available now.
With an vast array of PCIe lanes to start, AMD is making promise to consumers on an improved storage performance with the new NVMe RAID driver, according to the the execs at AMD they had this to say on their blog: "In our own performance testing, we’ve been seeing some blistering results from our test systems—a monstrous 21.2GB/s from six disks in RAID0," and they also had this to say: "But RAID users know that scaling matters, too, and X399 NVMe RAID still looked great in our lab: 6.00X read scaling, and 5.38X write scaling, from one to six disks.
Wait, there's more quotes from AMD: "Performance will naturally vary based on the model and quantity of SSDs you use, plus the test pattern of your benchmark, but it’s clear that our free NVMe RAID solution can scale and scale fast."
According to AMD, the new driver update will enable RAID 0, 1, 10 arrays. That is as long as a single GPU is installed in your gaming system, users can actually implement six NVME SSDs without the need for any additional adapters.
The new X399 driver will arrive in a AMD RAIDXerpt2 package, this can be downloaded from AMD's website listed under support. Its important you know that this particular driver only supports Windows 10 64-bit (Build 1703 or newer). The entire package includes an AMD RAIDXpert2 RAID Management utility and actual NVMe RAID driver.
Before you get things started, make sure the motherboard itselfhave the latest BIOS update from the manufacturer, meaning you must upgrade right away so that the motherboard can support RAID configuration which will require user to install two or more hard drives, in this case you'll need two NVMe SSDs within your PC.
Once you achieved the BIOS update, you then have the option to 1) use the motherboard BIOS to create your new RAID or, 2) do it within Windows 10 with the RAIDXpert utility software. Me personally I prefer the latter, going into your BIOS settings applying system tweaks take someone with a great deal of PC hardware knowledge. The key here is AMD's NVMe RAID solution will be boot ready and is supported on all Ryzen Threadripper processors.
Before you even think about proceeding with this upgrade, once again make sure you check and see if your motherboard manufacturer have the latest BIOS NVMe RAID ready for download. Good luck.
Key tech terminologies: RAID is acronym for redundant array of independent disks which is basically data storage that uses virtualization technology which actually combines multiple physical disk drive into one single unit of drive. The main purpose of using this technology is data redundancy and or improved performance.