Boot linux on Intel p3608

Notice: Page may contain affiliate links for which we may earn a small commission through services like Amazon Affiliates or Skimlinks.

ej24

New Member
Jan 9, 2020
2
0
1
Found a killer deal on a P3608 1.6TB. Saw the r/w speeds, huge endurance, amazing, ordered it immediately, figured it was thanks to the pcie 3.0 x8 interface…

Well after doing some more reading, (after ordering it *facepalm*) apparently it’s mostly thanks to the fact that its actually two pools of NAND, with two controllers running in RAID0 to achieve the full capacity and performance in a single physical drive. Well apparently this RAID0 configuration requires Intel RST enterprise driver to setup, and according to Intel documentation requires (maybe?) a xeon processor. Fantastic, I don’t have a xeon processor, but rather an AMD R7 2700 and I’d really like to set it up as my main bootable drive for my linux based workstation.

My system is a B450 based Ryzen 2700 system running Ubuntu 18.04LTS. I plan to run the drive in the main x16 slot, straight off the CPU so physical link isn’t a problem. (Shoved the single slot gpu down to a PCIe 2.0 x4 slot) Intel documentation includes instructions for how to compile the linux kernel with the Intel NVME drivers included, is that the correct route? Or would I still need the RSTe software? Or should I look into AMDs raid software? Or simply follow the steps for softraid during installation of Ubuntu?

Anyone familiar with this drive? Or how to properly set it up as a boot drive in RAID0? Is this even possible

Worst case scenario I use it as a data drive rather than my boot drive. Though the goal was to have a single, very fast, larger capacity drive rather than my current collection of random SSDs. Or I guess I could resell it and get a cheapo Sabrent Rocket M.2 PCIe 2TB drive, instead, which is way less complicated but being a consumer TLC drive with minimal DRAM it will be brought to it's knees after writing more than ~50GB. I suppose theres always the less convoluted DC P3600 without the dual controllers.

I should specify my use case is a workstation for Next Generation Sequencing analysis. Lots of reading and writing of big files simultaneously. I should also specify that I’m only moderately comfortable with command line, I’m a biologist first and foremost. Be gentle with me
 

ej24

New Member
Jan 9, 2020
2
0
1
I think I may resell this particular SSD. I think it's going to be too much of a headache to get going even as a storage drive and not a boot drive. I just need more storage. Ideally PCie based, a lot of it, and relatively cheap per GB. I'm not terribly interested in the super budget m.2 ssd's from Sabrent Rocket line or ADATA's XPG line. They have great sequential R/W but really suffer in heavy workloads, or when you exceed their DRAM or SLC cache. I have found a couple P4600 series SSD's for ~$500 (definitely top end of my budget) which based on the model numbers and firmware numbers appear to be OEM drives. Is there any reason I can't use one of these? Do they only work on say some proprietary Oracle or Cisco system or OSes? They should function like any other NVMe SSD right?
 

kdub

Member
May 20, 2019
34
9
8
I think I may resell this particular SSD. I think it's going to be too much of a headache to get going even as a storage drive and not a boot drive. I just need more storage. Ideally PCie based, a lot of it, and relatively cheap per GB. I'm not terribly interested in the super budget m.2 ssd's from Sabrent Rocket line or ADATA's XPG line. They have great sequential R/W but really suffer in heavy workloads, or when you exceed their DRAM or SLC cache. I have found a couple P4600 series SSD's for ~$500 (definitely top end of my budget) which based on the model numbers and firmware numbers appear to be OEM drives. Is there any reason I can't use one of these? Do they only work on say some proprietary Oracle or Cisco system or OSes? They should function like any other NVMe SSD right?
Pretty sure you have to be using a UEFI bios as very few nvme have legacy bios roms on them anymore. Assuming you're using UEFI, looks like only bootable at full capacity on "supported" xeon systems that auto raid 0 for you. I'm assuming that means VROC support.

The Intel SSD DC P3608 is presented to a system as two storage volumes, but on supported Xeon platforms Intel’s latest v4.3 RSTe drives will auto-RAID the drives together. For other platforms, software RAID 0 (striping), in addition to installing the latest Intel NVMe driver, is currently required to achieve peak performance. That means the drives aren’t bootable if you’d like to use the entire capacity in the striped pair, but its individual volumes are bootable.