PCIE gen 4 m.2 cards supported?

[Stumpy]

I was listening to the ubuntu podcast and one of the guys there
mentioned he just setup his new computer with a PCIE gen4 m.2 card which
enabled him to run 4 m.2 drives at the same time, he also squeezed more
performance out of it by doing raid 0 across the 4 drives.

Asides from the risk of loosing data, does/would #1 Qubes support pcie
gen4? #2 Is is possible to (if the hardware doesnt support it for some
strange reason) to do raid0 across 4 drives on a pcie m.2 card?

I am not in a huge hurry to upgrade but when i do i am keen on getting a
storage option that will make my qubes setup fairly fast and i assume
that with a super fast drive setup it would be able to sping up appvms
faster?

[Stumpy]

Another, perhaps more basic question, is anyone running qubes on a pci-e
gen 4 enabled motherboard? (and able to take, more or less, full
advantage of its speed).

[Zrubi]

On 11/8/20 4:38 PM, Stumpy wrote:
> I was listening to the ubuntu podcast and one of the guys there
> mentioned he just setup his new computer with a PCIE gen4 m.2 card which
> enabled him to run 4 m.2 drives at the same time, he also squeezed more
> performance out of it by doing raid 0 across the 4 drives.

Theoretically, and in some test cases, maybe...

> Asides from the risk of loosing data, does/would #1 Qubes support pcie
> gen4? #2 Is is possible to (if the hardware doesnt support it for some
> strange reason) to do raid0 across 4 drives on a pcie m.2 card?

Not as strange as you thing... as usually those RAID features are
meaning windonws only software raid.
So in practice, there is no (or at least very rare) hardware RAID on a
desktop board.

on Qubes (or in Linux in general) you can safely relay on software raid
not the one your motherboard suggest, but what the Linux kernel (even
the fedora installer) provides you

> I am not in a huge hurry to upgrade but when i do i am keen on getting a
> storage option that will make my qubes setup fairly fast and i assume
> that with a super fast drive setup it would be able to sping up appvms
> faster?

In practice (like appvm startup times), you can't even tell if your
system runs from a SATA SSD or from an NVME m.2 SSD. Imagine the much
less theoretical speed difference you may get using a PCI gen 4 device....

--
Zrubi

[Stumpy]

Thanks for the response!

Regarding not being able to tell the difference, I have an older system
(Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-4570 CPU @ 3.20GHz w 32gb mem) with a fairly
new/fast Samsung ssd I got this year but it still takes over 20 sec to
start up a firefox in a fed32 dvm, is that normal? Is it most likely
that the majority of the slowness is attributable to my ancient proc?

I just want to get a clear idea of where I should focus my spending,
that is on a CPU, faster drives, etc.

Thanks in advance!

[Totally Zoid]

I can't answer your question for certain, I changed my disk and CPU at the same time. It takes me ~10 sec to start a disposable Firefox, from clicking on the start menu entry to the window popping up (with about 20 VMs running in the background and no heatsink on the SSD).

I used to have an i5 and a 5400rpm drive and it was slow as hell, I couldn't even start two VMs at the same time without one of them crashing. Then a couple years ago I upgraded to Ryzen 7 and a gen3x4 SSD and while things aren't quite as instant as I'd like, it's good.

I dunno if you're running / can run at full speed a NVMe drive with the chipset you're on. If not your CPU might be bottlenecking your disk speed, not just your code execution speed. If you're upgrading the CPU you'll have to buy a new motherboard, which is roughly $150 for Ryzens.


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[Stumpy]

Thanks for the response.
I figure my cpu is likely at least alittle bit of a bottle neck, i just
dont know how much of a bottleneck but the confirmation is helpful.

I havent bothered with m.2 on my current setup as I am sure there is
something that would slow it down and make the whole thing moot.

I'd be curious to know what mobo you are using with your amd ryzen? In
general I am seriously considering going the AMD route but thats only if
I can be reasonably sure it'll "just work"

Cheers