Free NVMe RAID for X399 is now here

About a month ago we brought you news that AMD was planning to add NVMe based RAID capabilities to its X399 platform, and wasn't going to charge for it like Intel. The set date was September 25th, and while that date came and went with little fuss, nothing showed up except some BIOS versions that were quickly pulled (but had stated NVMe RAID was added).

Today we are happy to bring you news that AMD has followed through on their promise, albeit a few days late. While BIOS versions with NVMe RAID have been available for a few days, AMD's NVMe RAID driver has not, but you can now download it.

While we all know that RAID (redundant array of independent disks) is all about increasing speed and/or reliability, until now, NVMe drives were not capable of RAID on the X399 platform, instead you only had SATA RAID. The latest and greatest SSDs are all coming out as NVMe based drives, and now you can put them in RAID 0, 1, or 10 without paying a dime (well you have to buy the drives).

You can now take drives such as two Samsung 960 Pros and put them in a RAID0 array and get ~7GB/s of sequential read (leaks have shown speeds of multiple drives over 20GB/s), and the best part is that there is no bottleneck between the CPU and the PCI-E controller, since AMD's PCI-E 3.0 is all in the CPU.