Intel’s Core i9 and X299 enable crazy RAID configurations for a price - coffmanpras1993

Storage buffs will vex a massive dose of fun when Intel's X299 chipset launches. The brand-new Meat i9 chipset will support up to 20 devices in a bootable Bust partition.

The overlooked featured is named Virtual Foray into On CPU (VROC). We got taste of it courtesy of Asus, which showed the feature running in its new X299 motherboards using a 10-core Skylake-X CPU. A few motherboards support more than terzetto M.2 slots, so Asus misused its new Hyper M.2 PCIe board.

The Hyper M.2 lets you load up to four M.2 NVME PCIe drives into a single x16 card. You Don't have to worry about heat, because the Hyper M.2 features a beefy heat cesspit, thermal pads, and an active fan.

The Asus Hyper M.2 features active cooling to keep your drives from overheating

If you inhabited the Hyper M.2 with four drives and dropped IT into a slot straight along an older motherboard, it would work, but all you would catch is four individual M.2 drives. What's new is the ability to RAID information technology. All you wealthy person to coif is bring up into the board's BIOS and enable Intel's VROC feature film.

You enable VROC simply away going into the Hyper M.2 PCIe card's BIOS.

Once you've done that you can see your drives. For this demo, Asus misused eight Intel M.2 600P SSDs.

The VROC demo used eight Intel 512GB SSDs.

Merely wait, you say, you can only put four drives into the Hyper M.2 scorecard—how did we do eight drives? Just use two Hyper M.2 drives. A Coach Craze says: Boom.

And yes, you can build a RAID with two Hyper M.2 cards.

For a quick execution run, Asus used the industry-standard Iometer test likewise as Crystal Disk Mark. Under is what it looks equal to have a bootable Windows partition with eight M.2 drives.

With cardinal Intel SSDs, this Asus X299 motherboard can hit 12GBps of transplant speed.

Yes, that's 12GBps. What's wild is that it's nowhere secretive to the maximum that VROC supports. With 20 devices, Intel says it can, in theory, hit 128GBps. Asus officials say right now they're seeing As high as 13GBps, and they thinks there's more public presentation to be wrung away of VROC As it matures.

What's the catch?

There's forever a catch, and with Intel's VROC there's actually multiple catches. The Asus Hyper M.2 card works perfectly fine with, say, a Samsung 960 In favor of, and you could see four individual Samsung drives in RAID. If you want to use VROC to create a bootable partition, though, you can use only Intel SSDs.

Here's some other stop: X299 will launch with Kaby Lake-X and Skylake-X CPUs, but Intel VROC volition work only if with Skylake-X.

What may the biggest catch is this little thing right Hera:

Intel VROC key — Intel's Essential RAID On CPU supports upward to 20 drives in RAID 0 for free, but if you want more RAID 1 or some other redundant setups, you need to buy this key from Intel. No, we're non fashioning this up.

That little dongle is a key that Intel will sell to consumers. Out of the box, if you rich person Intel drives, an Asus Hyper M.2, and a Skylake-X, you can build a RAID 0 sectionalization. But if you need to enable RAID 1, RAID 5, or other RAID schemes with redundance to protect your data, you have to buy this Intel operative to enable it. If you scroll back up to the first BIOS shot, you can see the "premium" modal value is enabled, which way it supports the agio Foray into confirm. How much? No one seems to know.

So wherefore would Intel put wholly this work into a feature and then add a surcharge which could kill its espousal? Intel officials weren't on hand to say, but the overload is attendant the enterprise underpinnings of the Core i9 and X299 weapons platform, where the feature is an upwardly-sell. Intel can't sell information technology to one client and open IT away to some other, behind they?