PC Perspective's new way to visualize snappy SSD performance, even at triple 950 PRO M.2 NVMe RAID0 speeds

Allyn Malventano has an amazing way of doing things with storage, then he has a new way. All good. Very good. Check out this page of this recent comprehensive article:

• Triple M.2 Samsung 950 Pro Z170 PCIe NVMe RAID Tested - Why So Snappy?

where he gets into why he came up with a new Latency distribution / Latency Percentile test that he first introduced in his original 950 Pro review:

Latency Distribution and Latency Percentile
For a very long time now, I have hated the idea of plotting average latencies for SSDs. The reason is that you could have an SSD with a great average but a group of IO’s falling under a horrible maximum latency. You’d think the answer is to then simply use the maximum latency figures for tests, but that unfairly biases the results against an SSD that had just one IO that ran high during the test

In that same 950 PRO review, don't miss Allyn's picture of all the current NVMe devices, laid out in speed order, thumbnail preview at right. Nice!

If you like what Allyn and the guys are doing over at PC Perspective, you may also want to read about then subscribe to their amazing podcast, and consider supporting them at their Patreon page. You can see my pledge (bottom left). It's a fantastic PC hardware enthusiast site, and Allyn's magical work with IOMeter and many other tools is positively inspiring.

Note that doing this M.2 RAIDing has some drawbacks, including the usual RAID0 risks, and the loss of the use of the SATA ports on the motherboard. Ouch! You may also have some loss of GPU bandwidth if you're a gamer using SLI. [I was incorrect, explanation below] Remember, it's all sharing lanes on that PCIe 3.0 bus. That said, it's all rather fun and interesting to read about: don't miss the great comments below Allyn's triple M.2 article!

Mar 10 2016 Update

Unlike the pricier Xeon E5 family with the Intel C600 chipset, it appears the Xeon D-1500's Intel RSTe (Intel® Rapid Storage Technology enterprise) doesn't support RAID for NVMe. One example that I've just tested, based on the Intel Xeon D-1500, is the Supermicro X10SDV-TLN4F that's standard in the SYS-5028D-TN4T system. In RAID configuration, NVMe doesn't even show up, whether in Legacy (Ctrl+I) config, or in the UEFI BIOS-based config. This is true right up through the (about-to-be-released) BIOS 1.1.

The only RAID of M.2 or PCIe SSDs that might work is when they're AHCI (SATA) based, such as the Samsung SM951. Not something I can test though, since I no longer have those drives, having found my happiness with the Samsung 950 PRO, as a part of my overall storage strategy.

Note, U.2 isn't exactly friendly for small home servers, and I like the way Allyn sums up what's happening:

With the Samsung 950 Pro available, as well as the slew of other M.2 SSDs we saw at CES 2016, it’s safe to say that U.2 is going to push back into the enterprise sector, leaving M.2 as the choice for consumer motherboards moving forward. It was therefore only a matter of time before a triple-M.2 motherboard was launched, and that just recently happened - Behold the Gigabyte Z170X-SOC Force!

What about caching for your ESXi, using NVMe?

There's vSAN, essentially RAID over 10GbE

• VMware Virtual SAN 6.2 Features Deduplication, Compression, and RAID5 or RAID6 over 10GbE

This consumer gear discussed here won't be found on the vSAN HCL, but still, some real (not nested) home lab fun to be had here, as I discussed and demonstrated here:

• Supermicro SuperServer 5028D-TN4T vSAN dream is alive! Home lab video overview features Intel SSDs and Samsung M.2 SSDs

There's software caching too
See also Frank Denneman's latest teaser about FVP Enterprise, available as a 30 day trial. Anybody can grab and keep the read cache that PernixData FVP Freedom offers the home lab enthusiast, for free. Stay tuned for more about this!

Mar 10 2016 Update 2

Correction:
No GPU contention with M.2 for the Gigabyte Z170X-SOC Force, Allyn explains:

@paulbraren @pcper @vRobM Sweet, but no GPU hit on Z170 RAID - the NVMe devices are communicating via DMI. Only conflicts with SATA not PCI.

— Allyn Malventano (@malventano) March 11, 2016

See also at TinkerTry

• World's fastest consumer SSD - Samsung 950 PRO M.2 NVMe benchmark results

• How does copying over 200GB from one Samsung 950 PRO NVMe SSD to another in under 3 minutes sound? (42 copies of a 4.4GB Linux distro)

• PC Perspective's Allyn Malventano and This Week in Computer Hardware's Patrick Norton talk storage tech - NASs, NVMe, M.2, StableBit, 3D XPoint, a great listen

• All TinkerTry mentions of PC Perspective.

See also

• #Homelabappreciationday
  Mar 09 2016 by Frank Denneman at frankdenneman.nl

• Intel® Rapid Storage Technology enterprise (Intel® RSTe)
  Enterprise RAID driver powered by Intel® Xeon® Processors
  (RST/RSTe has never worked in VMware ESXi, just for Windows, and recently, Linux)