Gigabyte EPYC Dual Server and NVME RAID question

[phnguyen90]

Hello everyone,

I am currently working on setting up the RAID array for one of our customer however this time it will be on the AMD EPYC system instead of the Intel. Here is the spec of the server:

• Gigabyte Server: R281-Z91
• Motherboard: MZ91-FS0 for AMD® EPYCTM 7000 Series Processor Family
• Dual EPYC Processor
• 16x16GB ECC 2666mhz
• 4 x 3.2TB HGST U.2

Base on my understanding, EPYC does not include any additional hardware for RAID unlike Threadripper. I was looking in the bios and I don't see any tab regarding to the raid setting. Please correct me if I am wrong, in this case, I can either install the OS into one of the drive then use software raid to set up the rest as non bootable drive or I can use a third party RAID card and connect all 4 drive to the RAID card?

Thank you

 

[Patrick]

Use software RAID unless you are using VMware or Windows in which case you will want an external RAID controller for NVMe RAID.

 

[phnguyen90]

Hi Patrick,

Thank you for your quick reply. Could you please let me know which RAID software did you use to set it up? I was looking at RAIDEXPERT2 however they said it only support Threadripper and not the EPYC processor.

Thank you

 

[Patrick]

Generally, mdadm on Linux.

Great points though. I am meeting with Gigabyte in Taiwan later today. I will bring this up.

 

[phnguyen90]

I gave up on this setting and seem like the NVMe U.2 drive will only work with Linux software raid. The backplane of the server has compatibility issue with the raid adapter card and Gigabyte confirmed about this issue.

However there is no problem with the backplane if I replace the U.2 with SAS or SATA SSD to connect to the Raid card.

Thank you Patrick for your help.

 

[Jason Hirsch]

Generally, mdadm on Linux.

Great points though. I am meeting with Gigabyte in Taiwan later today. I will bring this up.

Very curious- do you speak the language?