NVMe: 2.5" SFF drives working in a normal desktop

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Patrick

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Dec 21, 2010
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Yea just hoping people share that article. Very expensive to produce something like that but a totally unique piece of content.
 

T_Minus

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Feb 15, 2015
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I know I'll be linking to it from numerous articles I'm working on, so you got that :)
 

T_Minus

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neo

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Mar 18, 2015
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Just an update on this, I ordered cables from the company on June 7th, no updates, no cables.

Anyone else order and/or get any?

Hoping NEO's come in soon :)
Just cancel your order from them. Mine should be in soon.
 
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neeyuese

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Feb 28, 2015
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I have installed the ASUS Hyper Kit on my new ASUS X99-Pro testbed. Same as Patrick, I bought 750 2.5inch just for that cable...

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You can enable the Hyper kit mode in ASUS bios.

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After that you can find P3700 in boot device list.

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Some desktop benchmarks here.

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After running Iometer QD32 128KB Sequence Write test for about 3 minutes , the driver limit the write speed from 2.1GB/s to 1.4GB/s due to high temperature. It's too HOT ! even can't touch the SSD case...

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Finally I put a 12CM fan like this when running the benchmark.
 
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T_Minus

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I have 8.1 with NVME running good now... not how it should, but good on 2011-v3 platform , a guy on[H] has it on a 2011 v/2 platform I'll test those boars soon.
 

T_Minus

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Just hit 80% CPU utilization of total of 30ghz Intel R3 E5 CPU with a P3700 800gb 2.5" & SM AOC card. Ram up the QD & Threads and these things open up to specs pretty much!
 

T_Minus

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And FWIW even with very very minimal airflow the P3700 is not at all "hot", maybe warm, but not on the high side of warm. I think the fan is 900rpm that's blowing across it, it's dead silent.
 

Patrick

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One thing to remember - the CPU utilization for benchmark applications is largely due to load generation.
 

T_Minus

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Honestly not too sure what you're getting at.

I'm not clear on what your definition of "load generation" is other than having a lot of threads with high QD, which I specifically said was why the CPU utilization was so high, if there are other reasons why benchmarking software cause false CPU spikes/utilization please, let me know. I saw a steady utilization almost consistently during the entire Read/Write tests 4k or sequential that had higher QD & #Threads.

Some benchmarking software that you can't change the # Threads or # of QD don't tax the CPU at all.

For a single user as a desktop I think there's nothing to worry about ;) but you're also never going to max out the drives performance.
 
Jun 24, 2015
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If I'm reading this correctly ...
"Just hit 80% CPU utilization of total of 30ghz Intel R3 E5 CPU"
a single NVMe SSD required 30 x 0.80 = 24 GHz to drive a single SSD?

Am I reading that correctly?

I did also read the following comment about "load generation"
but 24 GHz seems to be quite excessive.

Why are so many cores involved in doing I/O with a single SSD??

This is the sort of CPU utilization which we usually see
doing routine benchmarks with a fast ramdisk, but
even then there are usually only 2 cores involved --
one to do computation, and the other to do the I/O.
 
Jun 24, 2015
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As Allyn Malventano observed at pcper.com,
the Supermicro AOCs are "pass-thru" cards,
not RAID cards with their own input-output controllers.

One suspect, then, is the efficiency of your Supermicro AOC
e.g. the driver may need optimization.
 

T_Minus

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As I said, high QD and high Thread.
QD 128 Threads 10 - 79%
QD 128 Threads 64 81%
QD 128 Threads 1 -Low %
QD 1 Thread 1 - Low %

Like @Patrick said, this is a very unlikely work-load for most anyone I mean the drive utilization was 98% most of the time during benchmarking, how often are people driving SSD at 100%? During certain business operations, but most other cases rarely.

I agree, it could be the SM card.

I have some AIC NVME drives to test next, and see what they do to the CPU.

My other thread mentioned 20% utilization on approx 50ghz (Intel too) via ESXI Win VM testing.

Soon I'll have my file server setup with NVME drives and we'll see what real world CPU usage is when when it's being used by a handful of VMs :D
 

Patrick

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My sense is that the biggest issue is the efficiency of the load generation engines and is not the drives/ cards.
 

T_Minus

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Feb 15, 2015
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My sense is that the biggest issue is the efficiency of the load generation engines and is not the drives/ cards.
So you're thinking the Benchmarking software is putting a load that would be impossible to put on normally?

Along the lines of how Prime95 wasn't accurate / properly for Haswell by overloading it to a degree impossible under any workload, even at 100%? (So I heard, it would def. overheat if not properly cooled!! LOL)

These are all things I plan to address with additional "real world" benchmarks in the next 2 weeks.


Good info to share.

I have notes someplace too which benchmark utils caused high-load and others that didn't. The ones that didn't were not high QD or Threaded though.