Subject: How to create Samsung 950 Pro RAID 0, Z170 OC F?
Posted: 04 May 2016 at 5:12am
The next question I have had is whether attaching the NVMe's via certain PCIe slots decreases performance of any devices that are using SATA.
There are these passages in a review of the motherboard at TweakTown:
 There are three Ultra M.2 slots which each run at 4x PCI-E 3.0 and each one shares bandwidth with two of Intel's SATA6G ports/one SATA Express port so that they can RAID. The PCI-E layout isn't too difficult to figure out; all the PCI-E slots except one of the PCI-E 1x slots (PCIE5) are PCI-E 3.0. The first, third, and last PCI-E 16x slots are wired to the CPU. You can run 16x/0x/0x, 8x/8x/0x, or 8x/4x/4x on the first, third, and fourth 16x PCI-E slots. The second PCI-E slot is wired to the PCH at 4x PCI-E 3.0 as is one of the PCI-E 1x flex slots.Each SATA Express/2 SATA ports shares its bandwidth with one of the M.2 slots, so if you occupy all the M.2 slots, then all the SATA Express/Intel SATA6G ports will be disabled. However, ASRock provides four ports through two ASMedia SATA6G controllers, so you still have some SATA even if it isn't from Intel. ASRock provides two internal USB 3.0 headers as well as a vertical USB 3.0 port for easy USB stick access. |
| An ASMedia ASM1187e provides multiple PCI-E 2.0 outputs from a single PCI-E 3.0 input. One of the PCI-E 3.0 1x slots is connected to this chip. Extra controllers that don't require PCI-E 3.0 get their bandwidth from this chip, such as the ASM1061 used for extra SATA. The ASMedia ASM1074 is used as a 1:4 USB 3.0 hub for the USB 3.0 headers.... ASRock uses nine Texas Instruments HD3SS3415 which are PCI-E 3.0 quick switches; each can switch two lanes of PCI-E 3.0. Six are used to switch PCI-E lanes from the CPU to three PCI-E 16x slots. The remaining three are used to switch 2x PCI-E 3.0/ 2x SATA between each SATA Express port and each M.2 connector. |
Not being an engineer or especially technically inclined, I just wanted ASRock to confirm whether PCIe-attached NVMe traffic is completely separate from traffic of devices using SATA in terms of bandwidth.
Here's what ASRock Technical Support wrote:
| PCIE lanes does not shared with M.2. it shared with SATA ports. The PCIE lanes is from CPU and south bridge chipset as well. CPU has 16x lanes. PCIE 1x is used from south bridge chipset and PCIe6 slot would be from south bridge on this board. |
So going by that, it seems that I can use the NVMe's attached to PCIE1, PCIE2, PCIE4, or PCIE6 in Windows software RAID without having to worry about performance being affected by any devices attached to SATA ports.
Have I got that right?