AMD’s Free NVMe RAID Support For AMD X399 Chipset Now Available!

AMD has finally released their free NVMe RAID drivers for the X399 platform! You can download the latest AMD RAIDXpert2 package to obtain the NVMe RAID driver and management software. You’ll also need to update the UEFI/BIOS for your X399 motherboard, but after that you can install multiple NVMe SSDs into the system and have some fun.

AMD performance labs conducted internal testing back on 9/18/2017 and got some impressive results with six Samsung SSD 960 PRO 512GB M.2 PCIe NVMe drives. Performance started out at 3,536 MB/s Read and 2,141 MB/s Write with one drive and scaled up to 21,220 MB/s Read and 11,532 MB/s Write when they were run in RAID 0. AMD is getting up to 21.2 GB/s from this 6-SSD RAID0 setup, which is impressive as that is 6x scaling in the sequential Read performance. Sequential Write performance went up by 5.38x, so that too looked food.

The test system was using an AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1950X processor 32GB (4x8GB) DDR4-3200 (16-16-16-36) memory, ASUS ROG Zenith Extreme X399 motherboard, 1-6x Samsung SSD 960 Pro NVMe SSD (512GB ea.), default BIOS settings, Windows 10 x64 RS2, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 (driver 385.41), RAID Writeback Cache ENABLED, RAID Read Cache DISABLED, Write Cache Buffer Flush DISABLED.

RAID on the AMD X399 platform is again free and you can do RAID0 (striping), RAID1 (mirroring) or RAID10 (striping with mirroring). RAID10 requires four or six NVMe devices at a minimum. The AMD Ryzen Threadripper platform supports up to seven simultaneous PCIe devices without adapters, so if you have a discrete graphics card in a PCIe slot you are limited to the use of six NVMe SSDs. There are also no hardware activation keys, license fees, or SSD brand restrictions to get up and running.

You can find out more details about AMD’s NVMe RAID upgrade in the AMD community forum post located here.