@ncpl and @brian and @danny
Finished testing of different configurations when adding two Samsung 950 Pro M.2 in RAID 0.
Headless RoonServer on single Samsung 950 Pro M.2 was fast, but I see further performance increase:
- launch of Roon down from 4 min 50 sec to 2 min 50 sec
- no impact of library scanning time, as it is limited by Network and NAS performance/ availability
- first search time decrease in min case from 10 to 7 sec/ in max case 15 to 10 sec (tested on 10 different complexity search strings)
- second search time on recently executed search string from 5 to 3 sec
- visual browsing of Albums in ABC view almost instant flow, with 8 artworks loading in 1/4 of second (so fast, I really can’t measure), with more cover arts & photos setting on 18 artworks loading in 1/2 second
- on 44.1k AIFF On-Demand Audio analysis down from 2 sec to 1/2 sec
- on 192k AIFF On-Demand Audio analysis down from 8 sec to 4 sec
- start of playback in 1/4 sec - feeling instant
On technical side:
- for Intel NUC6i7KYK I found most optimal 32KB RAID 0 stripe
- BIOS & Win 10 power setting to max performance
- Intel RST set-up with Write-cash buffer flushing: Disabled and Cash mode: Write back
- rest does’t matter, as much as no additional SW and Utilities are loaded on PC
Running ATTO Disk Benchmark, I see following performance improvements:
- Write increase from 1500 MB/ sec to 2750 MB/ sec
- Read increase from 2500 MB/ sec to 3050 MB/ sec
Searching on web, in some Desktop systems with 2x 512 GB Samsung 950 Pros in RAID 0 with additional cooling, I have seen Read performance reaching up to 3400 MB/ sec, but could not reach so fast on Intel NUC NUC6i7KYK.
Limitation here are DMI 3.0, mobile Motherboard+CPU performance, and no dedicated cooling of SSDs.
