Hey guys, looking at doing some upgrades to my system and trying to figure out how to get the most of my NVME drives. A few questions related to how they can be used mostly with virtual machines as I’ve got enough disks for everything else. A bit about my configuration for context:

 

4x2TB Seagates: Mostly cold storage but a handful of larger games go here. 

 

2xKingston 120Gb: Striped as the cache array. Mostly appdata, but some games are on here too. 

 

1x240GB Sandisk: mostly data from dockers, like TES3MP goes here but again, some games too. 

 

1x500Gb Samsung 970 Evo: just got another one of these. Currently my Vms and almost all multiplayer games the system are used for lives here. 

 

Kind of an unorthodox config I guess but it’s segregated, it works, and I didn’t have anything else to do with my SSDs anyway. So, to the point:

 

1) What exactly is the status of NVME support? I’m under the impression for some reason that NVME drives are bottlenecked to SATA speeds but I can’t exactly substantiate that for some reason. 

 

2) If unRAID will slow the drives down and prevent them being used in the cache array at full speed, what’s the best way to utilise them such that I can have both vDisks (to boot VMs) and network shares (for shared game installations) on the drive, running at full speed? I would like to stripe the two NVME drives if possible, which I know my motherboard’s BIOS supports. 

 

I think this could sort of be achieved by passing the entire controller through to a virtual machine and then pointing back to vDisks stored on that VM to boot my other Vms, but this would eat up a lot of resources I’m not particularly willing to allocate and also make startup miserably slow which is already pretty rough. 

As far as I know there is nothing in Unraid that limits the speed of NVME drives.   However the term is often used to also describe M2 SATA SSD type drives which might be where the confusion arises.