While enthusiasts have been getting their hands on AMD"s Threadripper CPUs, bundled up inside some very distinctive packaging, it seems that the company has been getting back on the front foot in terms of taking the fight back to Intel. In fact, a month ago, one of Germany"s largest e-tailers noted that AMD sales outpaced Intel"s for the first time in a decade. However, despite the good news, there have been some grumbles from those looking to make the jump to the X399 platform.
While a good number of the X399 motherboards available to date have featured multiple NVMe slots, support has been lacking for the creation of bootable RAID0 arrays using NVMe SSDs. While the ability to create such arrays using standard SATA-based SSDs was available at launch, the feature gap did not go unnoticed by fans. Now, after having promised a little over a month ago to implement the capability, AMD has come through with the goods.
The aptly named "free NVMe RAID upgrade for AMD X399 chipset" sees a beta release of the driver and management software which will allow users to create RAID0 (striping), RAID1 (mirroring), and RAID10 (striping with mirroring) arrays. However, in order to create a RAID10 array, users will need a minimum of four NVMe SSDs.
Unsurprisingly, AMD seized the opportunity to show off some benchmarks with some fairly linear results with the addition of subsequent drives. While not everyone would be wanting to cram six NVMe solid-state drives inside their rig, it at least shows that the company"s X399 platform is up to snuff, at least according to synthetic benchmarks. it also serves as a blow against Intel who is charging X299 users $99 for a physical virtual RAID on CPU (VROC) key to plug into the motherboard just to enable RAID1 and 10 functionality.
For those that want to learn more about the ins and outs of the new NVMe RAID support should check out AMD"s knowledgebase article on the subject here.