Another announcement has popped up, this time from RCI, R-Comp Interactive (aka RCI – R-Comp’s sister company), about an updated release of their NVMe drivers. This is what Andrew Rawnsley’s email said:
R-Comp Interactive is pleased to announce that version 9d of our NVMe Drivers are now available.
Since the drivers are already incredibly fast (up to 80% faster than competing products), and work with a wide variety of drives, the focus this time has been on expanding functionality, features and the experience for both users and developers.
Headline features of this release include !NVMeTools, a friendly toolbox of NVMe related software for checking the health of your drive, formatting and configuring 512 or 4K sectors. The tools offer a friendly, desktop UI for managing your NVMe disk.
For programmers, example code is provided to demonstrate the various features, as well as documentation and source code via github.
Drive health can be monitored by industry standard S.M.A.R.T disc health checks, which run in a window on your desktop, with key info colour-coded for easy reference. It can also be integrated directly into the filer on the iconbar.
At recent user group meetings, we’ve been demonstrating support for partitioning, and up to 2TB per partition. This means that you could run up to 8TB on a single drive. In demo we showed a 4TB drive being used, as these drives are more practically affordable.
Key features:
- Class leading performance
- Up to 4 partitions, each up to 2TB in size
- Wide compatibility
- S.M.A.R.T disc health monitoring
- Supports both RISC OS and FAT32 partitions
- !NVMeTools software provides desktop UI for config
- Underlying BlockDevices architecture is 64bit aware for large drive support and provides an open-source, next generation architecture for RISC OS storage
- Supports CM4 boards and Pinebook Pro
The software is supplied free of charge with any NVMe drive, NVMe-related peripheral or NVMe-based Computer supplied by RCI. NVMe computers include our N.Ex.T range, Hydra and super-affordable mini.pi systems. Pinebook Pro is also supported.
Even if you prefer to DIY, why not get the drivers from us with a known-good NVMe drive that will be compatible with your Pi or Pinebook Pro computer? Contact us by phone or email to discuss your needs.
Owners can download the drivers from the usual download areas.
Note about Performance
At a recent ROUGOL meeting, the presenter demonstrated how he printed his documents to postscript. The example timings he gave were roughly as follows:
- iMX6 with SATA SSD – approx 5 mins
- Pi4 with USB SSD – more than 5 mins
- NVMe N.Ex.T system – approx 1 min
- RAM disc – 45-50 sec
The benefits of NVMe storage for real-world tasks are quite clear!
