Question Internal HW RAID5 M.2 NVMe

[tech1133]

I'm trying to add an internal 10-15TB RAID5 M.2 NVMe PCIe 4.0 data drive to a Win 10 Pro PC based on Gigabyte X570S Aorus Master MoBo with AMD 5950x CPU. I've had good experience with Areca HW RAID controllers over the years with spinning drives. It looks like for M.2 NVMe I have the choice of Areca ARC-1886-6n2i or MegaRAID 9560-8i or GRAID SR-1010. Highpoint products don't seem to support RAID5 and I don't want to use SW RAID. I love the concept of the GRAID solution, but for the time being it seems to be a paper product (July2022), since they're not available to buy on Amazon or Newegg. My goal is to build a relatively high performing (>10GB/s) internal SSD array for video editing for a reasonable price. Perhaps using 8 Samsung 980 Pro M.2 drives or similar. The only PCIe 4.0 x 16 slot on this motherboard is currently being used by an MSI NVidia 3070 video card. The two remaining PCIe 4.0 slots are one x8 and one x4. There is one Samsung 980 Pro M.2 NVMe on the motherboard being used as the C drive for OS and apps. The other three M.2 motherboard slots are empty.

Any suggestions for an appropriate internal hardware RAID 5 controller for this configuration?

 

[mdd1963]

Not sure you are going to have enough PCI-e 4.0 lanes available to do what you wish here (as your 16x slot already utilizes a CPU in it), as most PCI-e 4.0 NVME controllers with 4 slots are necessarily full length 16x lanes cards...

Most 8x lanes/dual slot M.2 variant discrete controllers are the older PCI-e 3.0, which would offer you no advantage over even a simple single PCI-e 4.0 drive already capable of 7,000 MB/reads/writes...

My searches at Newegg imply that any RAID 5 NVME controller will understandably be for a full length 16x PCI-e lanes card...for which you have no available slots anyway.

Below are Wendell's thoughts in general on HW RAID for NVME...

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l55GfAwa8RI



A controller that supports PCI-e 4.0 8x lanes is a BROADCOM 05-50077-00 PCI-Express 4.0 x8 PCI-Express MegaRAID 9560-16i PCIe 4.0 RAID Controller...

Discussed below, I think at least allows RAID 0 with a pair of internal SLimOcculink cables, and, an IcyDock adapter bay, as detailed below...

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oE_bte1-IwM

 

[tech1133]

Thank you for taking the time to respond to my post. I watched both of the videos above a couple of weeks before my post. Broadcom's performance (with IcyDock) is not what I'm looking for. Assuming I solve the single x16 slot issue by replacing the motherboard with another X570S that has 2 or 3 PCIe 4.0 x16 slots, are there any options that provide the kind of performance I'm targeting.