Ravenmaster

Rob_R
 
 
Ravenmaster  - Does IRSTe report back as "VROC in Pass-Thru Mode" on your setup?

It doesn't because i currently have the VROCISSDMOD key installed, which gives the option of RAID 0 and RAID1. However, if i take the key out it reports that VROC is in Pass-Thru Mode and the RAID 1 option disappears.

Also, for anyone interested I have some Crystaldisk scores below. This first pic is an old one of my SATA III setup using 2x 2.5" Samsung 850 EVO drives in RAID 0:

 
Next pic is the score i was getting from 1x Samsung 970 EVO M.2 NVMe SSD:

And this pic below is the setup i'm now currently using with 2x Intel 760p M.2 NVMe drives in RAID 0 using VROC:

So as you can see, the new VROC RAID 0 setup does pretty well. And bare in mind, the Samsung 970 EVO is a slightly faster drive compared to the Intel 760p. A single Samsung 970 EVO 2TB drive gets 3500 Seq Read and 2500 Seq Write, while a single Intel 760p drive gets 3230 Seq Read and 1625 Seq Write. Ideally i would have like to have paired up both Samsung 970 EVO drives in VROC and used those as my main bootable OS drive but unfortunately Intel doesn't allow them to be supported by VROC on the X299 platform (which is why i begrudgingly switched to 2x Intel 760p's). 

For a short while i had an Asrock X399 Taichi motherboard and a Ryzen Threadripper 2920X CPU. I was able to make a bootable RAID 0 OS drive with both my Samsung 970 EVOs on that platform which gave insanely good results for Seq Read/Writes (Read speed was around 6800 and the write speeds were around 4900). Unfortunately though, either the Asrock mobo or the Threadripper CPU was giving off huge amounts of DPC latency and i was getting microstutter in games with my RTX 2080 Ti and snap/crackle/pop over my speakers coz the latency was also affecting my sound card. So i ended up RMA'ing both the Threadripper and the Asrock mobo, which was a shame. Now i'm using the EVGA X299 Dark along with a Intel i7-9800X CPU and its perfectly stable on all fronts.

Just want to share with those who is still  interesting raid on X 299 Dark. I just got 2x 512 of intel 7600 Pro ( on ebay ~ $210 ).
 Set up in Raid 0 with VROCISSDMOD 1725 key ( Bios 1.14). Sometime I confuse that which crystaldisk version is the version trust the most ?  :), any news that X299 or any new VROC key come out that allow third party SSD to using Raid ?? :)
 

Ravenmaster
 

Woomack
VROC is scaling really bad on X299. It's fine in sequential bandwidth but random bandwidth which is usually the most important, is worse than that of a single drive. If you don't need bootable array then set single SSD as OS/bootable drive and set stripped volume in Windows storage manager. This way you will get much better performance.
I was passing that multiple times on various motherboards and Intel VROC is simply total fail. Intel support had no clue how to set it right and was only passing info which is on their product pages. For some reason AMD RAID on M.2 works much better in both, sequential and random operations.
I was comparing that using ASUS M.2 PCIE x16 card with 4x 250GB Samsung 970 Evo and 4x Intel Optane drives.
 
I can't find my screenshots with results on Samsung SSD/X299 but here are 4x16GB Optane in RAID0 on X299, VROC and Windows stripped volume.
16GB Optane drives are probably the cheapest drives that can be used in VROC RAID and I got 4 of them on black Friday sale so were perfect for my tests.
 
VROC / 4x 16GB Optane

 
Windows volume / 4x Optane

 
 
and 3x Samsung 970 EVO on X399
 

 
It was on early BIOS. Later version was helping in Q8/Q32 bandwidth. Somehow I can't find my other results.

Yeah Optane drives aren't really the same as proper M.2 SSD's. They're made to accelerate other drives rather than be a main boot drive or storage drive. The 16GB Intel Optane drives only have a read/write speed of 900/145 so those results you have make perfect sense (when pairing 4 of them). It also makes sense that your X299 VROC RAID 0 has lower results for the Q1T1 scores than Windows RAID 0 got. VROC is done via hardware, Windows is RAID is done through software. And the reason why that is significant is because after the microcode was updated to combat Spectre/Meltdown, it had a negative impact on Q1T1 VROC scores. Prior to the update, they were higher.
 
This does provide us with an interesting speculation though. Such as: "how well will these same drives perform in VROC RAID 0 when paired with newer Intel CPU's such as Ice Lake, that include Spectre/Meltdown fixes on a hardware level?" Only time will tell.
 
As for the Samsung 970's - those don't work in bootable RAID 0 on X299. Intel are actively blocking those drives at the BIOS level and they show up as 'not supported' in the VROC menu. This is a very obvious, deliberate attempt to get people to buy Intel drives which sucks because Samsung 970's have superior read/write speeds to Intel's 760p drives.
 
At one point, late last year i had an Asrock X399 Taichi motherboard and a Threadripper 2920X. The Samsung 970 drives did indeed pair up in RAID 0 over CPU perfectly and gave read/write speeds of approximately 6800/4900 (as far as i can remember - wish i'd saved a screenshot). I was only using 2x Samsung 970's drives btw. But i ended up RMA'ing the Threadripper CPU and the Asrock X399 mobo because they were giving off massive DPC latency which was causing my RTX 2080Ti to microstutter in games and my ZxR sound card to snap/crackle/pop over my speakers. All i did was swap out the Threadripper for a i7-9800X and the Asrock Taichi for a EVGA Dark mobo and the DPC latency was no more. No microstutters, no snap/crackle/pop. Seems AMD are having problems of their own in that regard.

(haven't noticed that reply before)
 
I don't know if you understood what I wanted to say in my last post.
 
It doesn't matter what speed single drives have but how array works once is configured in VROC. VROC suppose to improve performance but in every configuration, results are worse than in a simple software solution provided by Windows. Stripped Windows volume can't be bootable but OS can be installed on a small SATA SSD and everything else can run from a stripped volume. Also VROC keys are not required.
 
My results were made before Spectre/Meltdown updates and I was confirming everything with Intel and ASRock support (they also tested some settings for me). Performance in VROC on X299 motherboards is simply bad in everything but sequential bandwidth which is pretty much useless above some point in home/office environment.
I had no issues like that using ASRock X399M Taichi and 3x or 4x Samsung 970 Evo (mobo sockets or ASUS PCIE x16 card ). Storage performance was better than on X299 with VROC.
 
In games what counts the most is random read, not sequential bandwidth. Random read gives you fast access time to many small files on which are usually based games. Writes are covered by caching so won't cause any lag anyway. New high series, single M.2 PCIE SSD can have 60-80MB/s+ 4KiB Q1T1 read. Standard single SATA SSD get 25-30MB/s so ~40MB/s in RAID0 is lower than a single M.2 PCIE drive can make.