Software raid

[Venturi]

I have a dual epyc 7773x build on a gigabyte hb0-mz72 build. I have 5 nvme micron 9300 16TB each drives connected to the mini sas ports on the board

I can’t find AMD software raid they works on epyc, I hope I’m wrong, I have found several choices for Ubuntu, but I need this in windows
I’m running windows server 2022 data center

im evaluating using I software raid but can’t find any, can someone guide me to a solution that I don’t know about?

While drive optimization (trim) works on individual drives, if I stripe them in windows, then drive optimization becomes unavailable.

I will not be raiding my boot drive, this is strictly to group my D and E drives



So:
Can someone guide me to a software raid solution in windows for a dual epyc board?

Thank you

j

 

[Tech Junky]

I use Linux but, there should be something in disk manager or storage spaces to make raid happen. Otherwise Google it.

 

[i386]

windows has software raid (raid level 0, 1 & 5) and storage spaces (stripe, mirror, single and dual parity spaces) and both are underwhelming in storage optimized parity "raids".

windows software raid is available in disk management
storage spaces is available via gui (quite limited compared) and powershell.

 

[Venturi]

All true, except

I did google it, and was unable to solve the criteria:

windows storage spaces removes drive optimization (trim) when the drives are raided together, I'd like to be be able to have the optimize drive feature as it is available when the drives are kept individualized.

Unless someone has a fix for that problem

thank you

 

[Tech Junky]

Only thing I can think of is to virtualize the physical and drop the server inside of it. The other option would be a hardware raid card. Not sure what options are out there for U drives though since most of us go AMD for the cheaper dumb cards for more ports for drives.

 

[rtech]

Virtualize your windows install to VM p2v physical to virtual machine and use one of the Linux solutions.

 

[CyklonDX]

the bios/uefi software solution is typically provided by motherboard vendor. If your mobo doesn't offer that ... you don't have many options beyond what the os is offering to you. *typically in bios you can navigate between ahci and raid mode - which enables mobo semi-software raid.

(Don't use windows dynamic disks for os - its not raid1 alike - and your partitions will become unavailable once you loose or disconnect one of the disks - you will have to re-enable it to get it back.)

 

[Chriggel]

I think what you're asking about is AMD RAIDXpert2, which is AMDs software for host-based NVMe RAID. It's their equivalent to Intel VROC. But like it has been mentioned by @CyklonDX, for that to work you need to configure the array in you mainboard BIOS. RAIDXpert2 would then be the driver that you need to access this array in your OS. This is not a generic NVMe RAID solution, I think installing this won't achieve anything for you if the hardware platform doesn't support it.

 

[Venturi]

All true, hence my questions because I could not find a solution


thank you

 

[CyklonDX]

You can try getting tri-mode lsi raid controller (they support nvme raid 0/1)