Gadgetory

what's up guys ever hear with hurricane X and if you would call about a month ago I put together an awesome kick-ass threat repair gaming slash workstation PC if you haven't watched that video you can check it out right over here but to sum it up the build featured Indies flagship 1950 x16 core 32 threaded CPU which was cooled by the NZXT X 62 a i/o cooler 64 gigabytes of G skills glorious RGB transient a strict gtx 980ti from asus all housed inside this beautiful Corsair air 540 chassis now for storage I was rocking two samsung 960 pro SSDs one as my primary boot drive along with storing a few of my recently obsessed titles and other being a scratch disk for adobe premiere I was amazed by the read and write performance on these drives we're talking roughly 3.5 gigabytes per second on read speeds and 2.1 gigabytes per second on writes but it was right around the time and AMD announced their nvme write support on X 399 platform and I was anticipating that update ever since that announcement and now I'm here to walk you through the setup and some of the results that I was able to achieve after creating the raid array so that me further ado let's get into it to quickly refresh your memory the 960 pro is one of the fastest SSDs on the market that comes in an m2 form factor its high level of Nan endurance is a great feature to embrace especially for professional applications that heavily rely on reading and writing huge data sets and they're backed by a five-year warranty so that's awesome now setting up a raid array involves some serious precautionary steps and let's address the obvious and that's backing up your existing data it is crucial that you complete this step as creating a raid array would completely erase the data on your existing drives and it's pretty hard to recover that if you have an existing SATA raid configuration AMD recommends that you back up that arrays data and break down the current array before proceeding with the driver install and BIOS upgrade speaking in which most motherboard manufacturers should have rolled out a BIOS update for their ex 399 boards that basically adds support for nvme raid in my case I'm using the rog Zenith extreme x-29 and motherboard and I have a data the BIOS to version 701 as I'm making this video this board features a single - connector right underneath the PCH that comes with a thermal pad and there's this a dim dot - card it plugs into the slot right next to the memory modules and it can have two additional MD two drives installed each of which has access to four dedicated PCI lanes and this is what we'll be using to mount the SSDs initially I was thinking of doing a bootable r8 setup but I thought to myself that I might complicate things down the road so I decided to stick with a non bootable array and use my three-year-old Samsung 840 pro SSD as my primary OS drive that's right my friends I will be using this three-year-old SSD and believe it or not it's still staying strong now the raid array is gonna be used to store creative applications like Premiere Pro After Effects Photoshop and some games so that should contribute towards a much faster workflow okay so with that out of the way let's move on to the setup process after updating the BIOS I put it into Windows and downloaded the care package containing the AMD's raid expert to utility and the standalone nvme raid driver for Windows 10 directly from a DS website I'll link that down below I should also mention that you should be running build 1703 of Windows as that's what's currently supported for this setup now the raid driver is technically embedded within the executable file ie the utility file which needs to be extracted I said the extract destination to the desktop once the software version was updated I then rebooted the system and proceeded to install the expert 2 utility which annoyingly was deeply hidden within AMD's root files after installing that I ran into a problem where the web GUI didn't allow me to login now by default the username and password was admin admin but oddly the submit button wasn't functioning after spending countless hours of troubleshooting I finally figured out the problem huge shout-out to Wendell from level one texts who helped me figure out what went wrong so as you can see with the expert 2 utility the raid level is sent as zero and that means that the nvme raid drivers aren't being detected so the next step was to check out device manager and see if the drivers were installed properly now nvme SSDs required two parts on the software side to function properly the disk driver and the nvme controller driver if the UEFI BIOS is up to date then its device manager related in this case I was using Samsung's nvme driver that was and installed directly from Samsung's website but in order for raid to function we have to upgrade that to AMD's nvme driver so what you want to do is head over to storage controllers and select the Samsung and mimic controller we have two nvme SSDs in this case so we have to update both of them manually you then locate the standalone and me me rate driver zip file that you downloaded from AMD's website extract that and locate the RC bottom file within the RS 2 x64 folder repeat that step for the other controller then navigate down to system devices find the AMD rate config device and update that with the RC CFG file within the RS 2 x64 folder finally restart services for the rate expert 2 utility and login once it create your username and password you'll be directed to the main menu here we can see the two 964 SSDs we'll first have to initialize both drives upon completion we are ready to create the new raid array select the two drives name the array and hit create last thing you want to do is initialize the disks within the disk management inside device manager and you're done now what kind of performance came expecting when you decide to put two of these SSDs in raid 0 let's start with Crystal dis Marc we averaged reach speeds around 6 gigabytes per second and writes around 4 gigabytes per second guys that's just that's just insane I really don't want to what to say yeah next up running the a todas benchmark results in a 3.9 gigabytes per second on read speeds and three point eight gigabytes per second on writes a schultz mentioned that my CPU and memory were running at stock settings so what happens when you overclock both of them would that impact our raid arrays performance indeed I ran the crystal dis mark one more time after overclocking the CPU to 4 gigahertz and the memory to 26 66 megahertz and damn check out those read speeds just a tad above 7 gigabytes per second on the read side and 4 gigabytes per second on the write speeds I ran the a todas benchmark again and noticed a significant increase in we performance we're talking an extra gigabyte per second so to me that was just phenomenal and this makes sense because the processor houses the piece necessary for nvme raid so the faster the processor the higher the i/o throughput I also transferred a 20 gigabyte folder packed with 4k videos a few game folders and Excel files and it took roughly 25 seconds to transfer from the desktop to the 960 pros rate a raid that's pretty fast but as you can see the speeds are hitting roughly 1.6 to 1.7 gigabytes per second on the read side of things and I guess primary bottleneck here is obviously the 840 pro SSD performing that backwards took roughly a minute so once again this is heavily due to the bottleneck or the 840 pro SSD being the bottleneck so I'm going to leave you guys on that note I definitely like to hear your thoughts on nvm support for thread Ripper especially professionals out there who have already hopped on to X to $8.99 do you syrup if you you know currently have a 964 SSD do you see yourself you know picking up another drive and configuring them in raid so get those blazing fast read and write speeds and of course what do you think of what kind of applications do you think might take advantage of this setup definitely me know in the comments down below a huge shout-out to Samsung for sponsoring this video by the way stay tuned for the full performance segments of this build it's still in the works I'm still you know pulling up putting them together a set of benchmarks I'd like to run and yeah stay tuned for the next video until then I'm Eva with heart connects thank you so much for watching make sure to subscribe for more similar content and we'll see you in the next one