[Sharku]

Hello,

I am planning to set up a PC for running Ansys with a couple of 2 TB "Solidigm P44 PRO GEN 4 NVMe PCIe M.2 SSD (7000 MB/sR, 6500 MB/sW)" in Raid 0 configuration for increased performance. Is this a good idea? Which Raid 0 board should I select? The provider offers the following options:

-Broadcom MegaRAID 9540-2MS (530 €)

-Broadcom MegaRAID 9560-8i (1.121 €)

-Broadcom MegaRAID 9440-8i (371 €)

-Broadcom MegaRAID 9480-8i8e (1.229 €)

-Broadcom MegaRAID 9660-16i (1.519 €)



The Motherboard is ASUS PRO WS W790-ACE, and the CPU is Intel Xeon W7-3455 with 24 cores.

Thank you.

[naffrancois]

Hello,

Sorry I won't answer your question, just make a comment. Are you certain your workflow will benefit from raid 0 ? These nvme ssd are already pretty fast, I would not be surprised the only thing you get is a higher score on a specific hardware benchmark not in real applications.

[Sharku]

Actually, no, I am not sure Raid 0 would be a good option in practice. That is also part of my question actually. Your feedback is greatly appreciated. Based on your response, if nobody else has a different opinion, I will discard using Raid 0.

[flotus1]

There are use-cases for blazing-fast NVMe SSDs in "RAID 0". Some of them are even best practice.
The poster child of applications is out-of-core scratch space for FEA solvers.
But you really don't need an external controller for that, software RAID is just as good here, if not better. Because we don't want the controller, or its PCIe interface, to become the new bottleneck.

Outside of these niche applications: no, probably not a good idea.

Edit: about that scratch space idea...
Selecting the right SSDs for that is just as important. The workload will be read-intensive, but there will also be a lot of writing going on. More than consumer SSDs can handle, neither short nor long term.
We don't want the SSD to overheat. We don't want them to run out of SLC cache. And we don't want to exceed the write endurance within a few weeks.
I have used Samsungs PM1735 for such an application. The only downside is that there are no firmware updates when buying the drives directly. But that was acceptable to me at the time.