Unfortunately I have no x20 PCI slot available so I can only actually use less than half of NVME's bandwidth. Not very appealing given the cost. Thanks for advice though. Appreciate it.
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Lycom DT-125 and RAID 0 question....
- Thread starter Arhitekt77
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There is not much choice to achieve 4TB 1500MB/s storage on cMP.
RAID 10x HDD together obviously is not a good option.
Or you can RAID 4x 1TB USB 3.0 SSD together. However, you will need an expensive Sonnet Allegro Pro to achieve that externally (if you want to achieve this with only one PCIe slot). Also, those real "fast" USB 3.0 SSD is not that cheap either.
If you can use two PCIe slots. Then you can buy two PCIe SATA III card (e.g. Apricon Velocity Duo x2), and RAID 4x 1TB SATA SSD (e.g. 1TB MX500) together. Each card cost you about $150, and ~$180 for each SSD. So total just above $1000. This setup can just reach 1500MB/s. Not too bad.
ON the other hand, each 2TB 970 Evo cost about $700, so, two of them cost $1400. The required adaptor is only $20 each. So, totally a bit above $1400. But this option can achieve 3000MB/s not 1500MB/s. Double the speed, about 40% extra cost. A bit over kill. But since no consumer 4TB NVMe available yet, this may be the best alternative.
Another "low cost" way but not always able to achieve 1500MB/s is to combine a 2TB SATA SSD with a 2TB NVMe SSD. e.g. A Micron 1100 2TB only cost $300, pair it up with a 2TB 970 Evo. The total cost is still just $1000. No adaptor required for the SATA SSD, just plug that into the optical bay. You already has a DT-125 for NVMe, so no extra cost as well.
Combine these two SSD into a single 4TB Fusion Drive. Let the OS to decide when you need to use the real high speed NVMe SSD, and what data can be stored on the slower SATA SSD.
In any case, no x20 PCIe slot is required.