AMD have issued a product advisory for one of the lesser-known features of their Ryzen desktop CPU platform. StoreMI, a technology that streamline the implementation of tiered storage in a system, has been given End of Life status and will no longer be available through official channels, nor supported with updates. Installations and downloads made prior to March 31st will continue to operate without change (AMD will not remotely disable the features), but the software team are cautioning against acquiring it from 3rd party sources.

StoreMI was introduced alongside the 400-series motherboard rollout in 2018 and was supported on both 400-series (Ryzen) and X399 (Threadripper) platforms. The software pooled multiple miss-matched SSD and HDD storage drives, assessing their individual performance and locating data on a drive most suited to its access frequency and other requirements. A further boost in performance could be attained by reserving up to 2GB of RAM for the storage pool. The solution boasted faster Windows boot and program access times without giving up a portion of storage for a caching solution such as Intel's RST, in addition to being an affordable approach that's straightforward to manage.



StoreMI wasn't a new concept. Third party solutions had existed for some time, and AMD even advise users who require long-term support to transition to one of the many alternatives available on the market. It was however novel to bundle it with a mainstream PC platform, even if it seems likely to have not taken off quite as they would have hoped.

AMD are expecting to roll out a replacement in Q2 2020, which may be complementing feature for the new range of Ryzen 4000-series laptops or refreshed business-oriented Ryzen Pro portfolio.

SOURCE: StoreMI Product Change Advisory