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Journeyman III

AMD-RAIDXpert2 support for latest EPYC processor ?

Dear AMD Community Users / EPYC experts / and official AMD representatives (if you read this),

for personnal reasons, I am considering building an home made HEDT workstation using next generation (Zen 3 ?) EPYC processor.

I am not in a hurry, and I am still waiting need to see the eco-system around EPYC processors to settle a little bit, especially motherboard availibility and stability for consumers like me.

In the meantime, I am evaluating the current options, and I noticed something.

I already have a home made PC using competitor CPU, and what I liked about my system is that I was able OOTB to easyly setup a (software) RAID0 / SSD volume from which my Windows OS is booting.

This has been working flawlessly since 2015, and I was able to enjoy NVMe like performance on an 1.8 TB volume (4 x 500 GB) even before true 'TB' M.2 NVMe were generaly available, and for a very fair price at the time.

It really emphasize the value of using 'Redundant Array Inexpensive Disk' for better performance.

And even if RAID experts call that 'fake-RAID', I found that software RAID combined with SSD is a winner combination as it remove the 'mechanical' weakness of HDDs and even the need for 'cache'.

So of course, for my next system I would like to do the same with an AMD CPU.

I figured out that AMD provides so called 'RAIDXpert2' technology to setup a RAID volume at the BIOS/UEFI level.

However, it seems that technology is specifically NOT available for EPYC processors;

https://drivers.amd.com/relnotes/amd-raidxpert2_user_guide.pdf  

is there a reason for that ?

because ultimately, here is what I believe:

I believe there is NO point of providing multple SATA ports (up to a dozen sometime) on any MOBO if there is no way of combining them in a RAID (0, 1, 5) volume and seamlessly boot a Windows or Linux from it.

would someone disagree ?

if no, is there a way to convey that question to AMD ?

if yes, explain me why ?

Thanks very much for your attention and future replies/comments.

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