AMD’s Threadripper platform will reportedly not support NVMe RAID at launch

One of the biggest features of AMD’s X399 platform is its support for 64 PCIe lanes (4 are dedicated to the chipset), allowing it to be used with more PCIe devices than Intel’s similarly priced X299 Skylake-X hardware.    

While these extra PCIe lanes will be useful for those who use multiple GPUs or NVMe SSDs, it has been discovered that AMD’s TR4 platform does lack what could be considered as an important feature, NVMe RAID. 

In a recent report from Tom’s Hardware, it has been reported that hardware NVMe SSD RAID is not supported on X399, though AMD is working on a solution to this problem. At this time there is no release timeframe for an NVMe RAID update, so it is safe to say that this feature will not be available at launch.    

With modern NVMe SSDs, especially on faster models, NVMe RAID is almost unnecessary, with dual Samsung 960 Pro SSDs achieving speeds that are in excess of 5,000MB/s.  With a single Samsung 960 Pro already achieving 3500MB/s reads (A fast SATA SSD offers 550MB/s reads), do modern PC builders really need the performance benefit of RAID? 

 

  

While many will not consider the lack of NVMe RAID capabilities at launch, it is certainly an issue that some will consider worthy of consideration, depending on their own storage requirements. 

 

You can join the discussion on AMD’s TR4/X399 platform lacking support for bootable NVMe RAID configs on the OC3D Forums.