Question about NVMe SSD Adapter Cards

sygnus21 said:

This is my setup since my board supports 3 NVMe drives. I've got one NVMe drive for the OS and the other drive for photo work. The other slot is empty. System also has 3 SATA SSD drives.

Anyway if you're planing on running two NVMe drives you need get a motherboard to support it. And yes, depending on motherboard you can run dual NVMe drives just fine without lane issues. As I said, I run dual NVMe drives and the it costs me is loss of my PCIe x4 slot (bottom PCI slot). Since I have no need for it nothing is lost. And all my SATA ports remain available.

The Z390 chipset offers 24 PCI-E lanes. My primary system (AMD) uses an X570 chipset, which only does 16. That colors my thinking.

I doubt that I'd use that many drives, even absent PCI-E resource issues. As in "My Computers", I tend to have an SSD for the OS/programs/"documents", plus an HDD for everything else. (No games. No significant media archives.)

sygnus21 said:

Even at 16 lanes you can still run multiple NVME drives if the board supports them. You just have to realize you might be sacrificing a SATA port or PCIe slot depending on NVMe (m.2) ports used. There should be a m.2 matrix in your owners manual telling you what slots costs what. Here's my Z390 board's matrix showing the 3 available m.2 (NVMe) slots showing what each would cost if used....

(snip)

In the above I'm using the M2A and M2P m.2 slots. With this configuration I lose no SATA slots, and since I'm not using the PCIEX4 slot, I don't have to worry about speed degradation there.

BTW I have no HDD's in my system, nor do i run anything off HDD's for my system. I do has a NAS box with 4 HDD drives though.

The manual for my MSI motherboard isn't all that clear. On other boards, adding an X4 device may lose two SATA ports.

The first M.2 slot uses PCI lanes from the CPU. If it's a Gen3 Ryzen, it's PCI-E 4.0. The second is from the X570 chipset, and it's PCI-E 3.0. (Sad. ) For enthusiasts, the two M.2 drives can be run in RAID. (I ran an HDD software RAID 10 years ago. I'm never doing anything like that again. It reverified the RAID after every Windows crash. Took hours.)

I read your specs and see that you're an HDD avoider. When are you going to a Flash NAS?

sygnus21 said:

(snip)

I'm not running RAID in my system being I have all SSD drives. That's me. However, I am running in RAID 10 on my NAS box.



If you mean a NAS with all SSD drives.... when I can buy a 10TB SSD drive for $200 or less

I hope that the NAS box uses a hardware RAID controller. (I have no such box, and don't want one.)

10TB SSD for $200? That's $0.02 per GB. I bought a 120GB SSD in 2011 for around $120, or $1 per GB. A 1TB M.2 SSD can be had for roughly $100 today, $0.10 per GB. Assuming the same exponent, you won't get the 10TB drive for 7 years or so. Sad.

My own near-term fantasy is a WORM drive (write once, read many) with a capacity of at least 1TB. I have a BD drive that can burn BDXL disks, but 100GB (or 128GB) is too small. (And unpopular. And expensive.)

I always bet on bad NV storage tech. I may still have a 20MB Floptical drive (SCSI, useless to me now) somewhere, and I retired my Zip 100 drives years ago. (The 20MB Floptical is ancestor to the LS120, yet another tech that never caught on.)

I am running 2 x 1TB NVMe drives in a Ryzen 3800x build on an Asus x570 tuf mobo. Combination works well.

pparks1 said:

I am running 2 x 1TB NVMe drives in a Ryzen 3800x build on an Asus x570 tuf mobo. Combination works well.

As should be.

My motherboard has one PCI-E X16 slot, a second X16 slot that is limited to X4 electrically, and 3 X1 slots. It has two M.2 slots (4 PCI-E lanes each). One is run off the CPU, and is PCI-E 4.0 (with a gen 3 Ryzen). The other is off the chipset, and is PCI-E 3.0.

The only limitation I can find in the manual is that only two of the three X1 slots can be used simultaneously.

The CPU has 24 lanes. The MB has 16.

The CPU to MB interface uses 4. The primary graphics slot, 16. The PCI-E 4.0 M.2 socket, 4. (That's all 24 CPU lanes.)

From the chipset: the second X16 slot, 4. The second M.2 slot, 4. Two X1 slots, 2. That's 10.

I don't know how the remaining 6 chipset PCI-E lanes are allocated. A quick Web search provides no clarity.

sygnus21 said:

Looking at page 30 of your owner's manual it looks like you don't lose any SATA or PC slots in choosing either of those two m.2 slots. And your choice of slots comes down to which NVMe drive to use - M2_1 for PCIE Gen 4 or M2_2 for PCIE Gen 3.



Where does is say that? Page#?

Page 15:

3x PCIe 3.0 x1 slots*
* PCI_E2 will be unavailable when installing the PCIe card in PCI_E4 slot.

PCI_E2 and PCI_E4 are both X1 slots. PCI_E5 is the third X1 slot. See p. 25.